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JESUS CHRIST, AND 
THE WORLD TOD AY 

GRACE HUTCHINS 

AND 
ANNA ROCHESTER 



JESUS CHRIST AND THE 
WORLD TODAY 

BY 

GRACE HUTCHINS 

AND 

ANNA ROCHESTER 



NEW <^§Jp YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, 1922, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



JESUS CHRIST AND THE 
WORLD TODAY. II 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMTCRTPA 

JUL 26 1922 LC Control Number 

©CI.A68I107 



tmp96 027052 



PREFACE 

The aim of these studies is to seek in and 
through the mind and experience of Jesus Christ 
the way of life for individuals, churches, classes, 
and nations that shall lead toward a solution of 
our present problems. We believe that Jesus 
Christ is the hope of the world ; the studies assume 
this belief and attempt to analyze its implications 
for the world today. They do not attempt, how- 
ever, to present an economic or political program. 
"We believe that such programs are very definitely 
the concern of Christians, but intelligent discus- 
sion of programs must follow a clear analysis of 
our personal share in social wrongs and of the 
kind of relationships we should try to express in 
our economic and political life. 

Just as the preparation of these studies was 
begun, The Untried Door, by the Reverend Rich- 
ard Roberts, came to us. We read it with a deep 
sense of agreement and gratitude. We must ex- 
press our indebtedness, also, to the late Walter 
Rauschenbusch whose Christianity and the Social 
Crisis translated for us several years ago the 
hope of the Kingdom into terms of modern life. 

G. H. 
A. R. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface y 

CHAPTER 

I The Hope 11 

II With the Family at Nazareth ... 32 

III In the Community 47* 

IV Principles and Qualities 66 

V The Conflict 82 

VI Intercession 101 

VII The Measure of Success .... 115 

Till The Eisen Life 127 

Appendix: Suggestions for Study Groups 145 



JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 



JESUS CHRIST AND THE 
WORLD TODAY 



Chapter One 
THE HOPE 

A small country, engrossed in its own affairs 
and primitive in its economic structure, separated 
from us by nineteen centuries of shifting empire 
and changing civilization, the Palestine in which 
Jesus spent the years of his earthly life, faced, 
in miniature, certain problems that today are 
shaking the world. Our essential kinship with the 
people among whom Jesus lived is perhaps ob- 
scured by our differences in form, with the para- 
phernalia of modern comfort, the machinery of 
large scale production and intercommunication, 
the subways and office buildings and factories and 
schools and tenements and museums and palaces 
of a modern city. We recognize, of course, a cer- 
tain identity of individual sins. We do not so 
easily see the identity of the evils in their social 
structure and in our own. 

Such problems as child labor in factories, bad 

housing in congested districts, industrial accidents 

and occupational diseases, industrial employment 

of married women whose children need them at 

11 



12 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

home — to mention only a few among many — have 
so clear a relation to the age of machine industry 
that obviously they had no parallel in Palestine. 
But these are all corollaries of the great funda- 
mental problem of poverty. And poverty and 
riches were distinct in Palestine. 

Again, the conflicts between labor and capital, 
and between subject nations and an imperial over- 
lord, such disputes as that between American oil 
companies and the Mexican government, and be- 
tween Japan and China over the control of Shan- 
tung, even the antagonisms that made possible the 
Great War, have their roots in a desire for domi- 
nation. Even so, in Palestine, power was held 
by a few who were watchful against losing it 
and who used violence and corruption to main- 
tain it. 

Within America, race antagonisms are evi- 
denced by our attitude towards the uneducated 
immigrant, by the white man's sense of superi- 
ority to the Negro, expressed in a hundred ways 
ranging from benevolent leadership to mob tor- 
ture, and by the Negro 's increasingly bitter hatred 
for the white race. So during the centuries pre- 
ceding the birth of Jesus the race pride of the 
Jews had kept them distinct from all others and 
had led to war and continuing enmity with the 
Samaritans. 

Before we attempt to trace the experience of 
Jesus and the way in which He approached the 
problems of Palestine, let us picture as well as we 
can the form of the problems Jesus faced, keep- 
ing in mind the identical roots of the evils of his 



THE HOPE 13 

day and of our own : riches and poverty, control of 
power, and pride of race. 

Consider first some of the rich men and the 
sources of riches among the Jews that appear in 
the gospel pages. There was the rich land-owner 
with his bailiff and under-servants, 1 and the other 
rich land-owner who wanted to rebuild his barns. 2 
There were the men with a position to maintain 
which required attention to the niceties of dress. 3 
There were bankers and money-changers in the 
Temple courts, 4 and money-lending as a profitable 
occupation was common enough to be used as an 
illustration in the parables of Jesus. Others be- 
sides money-lenders — the owner of a vineyard, for 
example — were men of substance who" could leave 
their business or their estate to the care of sub- 
ordinates 5 and have their income continue while 
they traveled or spent the season at Jerusalem. 
Merchants bought and sold, and their traffic was 
sometimes in luxuries that only the wealthy could 
buy. 6 There were those who collected their pos- 
sessions in private houses. 7 The extortion of the 
Pharisees and their devouring of widows ' houses 
are not explicitly described, but their wealth was 
such that even lovers of money 8 could make large 
contributions without inconvience to themselves. 
The high priest lived in a mansion with a court- 
yard and hired servants. The anger of the priests 
when Jesus cleared the courts of the money- 
changers and the dealers in animals 9 suggests 

iMatt. 24:45-51, Luke 12:16-18; 2 Matt. 11:8; 3 Mark 11: 
15-19; 4 Matt. 25:14-30; 5 Mark 12:1-12; e Matt. 13:45-46; 
7Matt. 6: 19; « Mark 12:41-44. » Mark 11: 15-19. 



14 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

that the priests were profiting from the business. 
(A contemporary protest in the Jewish Talmud 
has come down to us against the amount of the 
Temple revenue that found its way into the pock- 
ets of the priests.) 

The social differences resulting from, wealth 
may have been more marked in Jerusalem than 
among the Jews in the country of Judea or in Gali- 
lee, but riches and *the distinction between rich 
and poor were evidently a commonplace in all the 
regions where Jesus taught. The educated look 
down on the unlettered; the rulers of the syna- 
gogue stand out from the multitude. There are 
chief seats and titles of honor, with an aristocracy 
of birth in the priestly families and an aristocracy 
of learning among scribes and Pharisees. Theo- 
retically any Jew might rise to distinction in 
scholarship, but practically — according to the 
teacher Ben Sira — this was possible only to a man 
of means. And wealth by itself seems to have 
brought social position, except that no Jewish 
gentleman might be a tax-collector for the Bo- 
mans. Apart from the slaves and the beggars who 
stand out so prominently in the picture of the 
Palestine in which Jesus lived, there were thou- 
sands of poor working people — craftsmen of all 
sorts, fishermen, shepherds, farmers and vine- 
dressers, hired servants and day laborers — who 
had neither slaves nor servants to wash their feet 
or prepare their meals or sweep their houses or 
till their soil. Even in the simple agricultural life 
of Palestine the difference between riches and 
poverty was so well recognized that the Hebrew 



THE HOPE 15 

law provided for substitute offerings to be made 
by the poor man who could not aiford the animal 
required from the well-to-do. Every Jewish boy 
was taught to work with his hands, and manual 
labor was more highly regarded among the Jews 
than among the Greeks or the Romans. But the 
men who did manual work appear in the gospels 
among those who lived in simplicity and made 
the offerings of the poor. The wealthy were using 
the work of others — usually slaves, but not always 
— or were profiting from banking or commerce. 

And wealth brought power. The slave was not 
the only Jew who was subject to others. Within 
the Jewish community and apart from the domi- 
nation of Borne, a minority controlled the people. 
The fact that every boy learned a trade did not 
by itself ensure his security. "We read in the gos- 
pels of the men standing idle in the market place * 
waiting to be employed, and Josephus tells us that 
one reason why Herod the tetrarch set 50,000 men 
to work on various building projects was that 
great numbers were unemployed. 2 WTien they 
were hired, the workers must do the employer's 
bidding and accept his conditions. 

In the organization of the Jewish church the 
common people were subject to the priestly caste 
and were exploited by them. They were taxed 
heavily for the support of the Temple and the 
priests, and any one who refused to pay his Tem- 
ple tax became a " sinner " and an outcast. When 

iMatt. 20: 1-16. 

2 Mathews, Shatter. History of Neio Testament Times in 
Palestine, p. 124. 



16 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

the people went to the Temple they were made to 
pay more than a fair price for the changing of 
their coins and the purchase of their sacrifices. 

The administration of justice also lay with those 
who had wealth and social position. The San- 
hedrin, to which the Eomans allowed supreme 
jurisdiction in all matters peculiar to the Hebrew 
law and usually in civil cases or in criminal cases 
not subject to death penalty, was composed of 
priests and of scribes learned in the law and of 
other rulers and " elders' ' representing the two 
parties of Pharisees and Sadducees. The irregu- 
larities to which they would descend when the is- 
sue was sharp between the people and themselves 
are illustrated by their conduct of the trial of 
Jesus. 

The Eoman dominion also fell most heavily on 
the poor. ~ Customs duties and taxes on sales were 
added to direct taxation. These indirect taxes, 
farmed out to contractors and by contractors 
farmed out to collectors (publicans) invited graft 
and extortion, and were acutely oppressive. Con- 
temporary history records that in one year the 
people of Asia had to pay the Eoman taxes three 
times over. The Eoman method of maintaining 
power may be favorably compared to the methods 
of oriental empires that preceded Eome, but it 
still included a free use of violence. Eome stood 
by while King Herod disposed of possible rivals 
by killing all male infants in a certain district, 
and a little later Pontius Pilate the procurator 
(who was so well regarded by the imperial gov- 
ernment that he held his office for ten years) killed 



THE HOPE 17 

a number of Galileans who had come up to Jeru- 
salem and were suspected of sedition. Officials of 
the empire thought it expedient to keep down un- 
rest by executions which often took the form of 
crucifixion. False accusations and extortion vio- 
lently enforced were sufficiently common to be re- 
buked by John the Baptist when he saw Eoman 
soldiers in the crowd that came to hear him. 

Practically all Jews resented subjection to the 
heathen Eomans. The Maccabean revolt against 
Syria and the short period of independence when 
prosperity and national prestige had reached their 
highest point since the days of Solomon had inten- 
sified racial pride. But in the different classes 
among the Jews this racial pride was mingled with 
various other elements. Parties which united in 
believing that the Jews were a superior race and 
that Jehovah would ultimately establish their king- 
dom differed profoundly in their immediate de- 
sires and programs. The sense of living in a 
special covenant with Jehovah had for generations 
been inculcated in every Jewish child. With the 
Pharisees this had developed into a desire for com- 
plete separation from the Gentile world, and their 
resentment against Borne was fed from the two 
springs of national pride and religious pride. In 
the main, however, the Pharisees were not inclined 
to violent revolt. They were free to follow the 
Law without interference ; the Sanhedrin, in which 
at the time of Jesus' public life the Pharisees 
were the majority party, had enough power to 
satisfy the instinct for domination, and materially 
they prospered in spite of Boman taxes. Possibly 



18 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

the sense of martyrdom under such pleasant cir- 
cumstances enhanced their self-satisfaction. The 
Sadducean party was less concerned with religious 
separation from the Gentiles than with increase 
of political authority for the priests. They had 
even flirted with Hellenism in the past, and were 
frankly worldly in their philosophy. The Sad- 
ducean party included the chief priests and many 
of the wealthy conservative families whose sym- 
pathies were with the priestly class. The party 
of the Pharisees was also dominated by men of 
wealth, but it included the leaders in scholarship 
and piety. Even the best of the Pharisees had 
little understanding of the needs of the multitude. 
The scribes of the Pharisees were by training and 
by position of the privileged class. The scribe was 
not only a religious leader but a lawyer, a judge, 
and a scholar. By their education and by their 
rank as teachers or rabbis these lawyers of the 
Pharisees were separated from the common peo- 
ple. The Pharisees' hope for freedom from Rome 
was based on faith in the righteous kingdom of 
Jehovah, but such present details as the oppres- 
sion of poor Jews by the Romans and by wealthy 
Jews seem not to have troubled them. 

Far less important were two other small parties, 
the Cananeans or Zealots who from time to time 
attempted to stir up armed revolt against Rome, 
and the Herodians who openly espoused the cause 
of the Herods, demanding that the kingdom of 
Herod the Great should be reunited and have a 
semblance of independence and that the Roman 
governor be withdrawn from Judea. 



THE HOPE 19 

The multitude drifted, sheep without a shepherd. 
They rose with the Zealots against registration 
for Boman taxes ; they flocked to John the Baptist 
when he preached equality of wealth and the end 
of extortion, and to Jesus the messenger of re- 
lease to the captives and freedom for those whom 
tyranny has crushed ; and they shouted for Barab- 
bas, a leader of violent revolt. Practically, na- 
tional independence had meant little to a class 
whose insecurity and poverty had been scarcely 
less when they supported a Jewish high-priestly 
king than when heavy taxes were paid to a heathen 
empire. During the period of national independ- 
ence their hope of a Messiah and a new age of 
righteousness had been deepened and intensified. 
Now Borne had become the symbol of oppression, 
and their one hope of justice, the promised king- 
dom of the Messiah, was essentially a national 
hope which could not be realized until Borne was 
overthrown. 

But all Jews, rich and poor, the masters and 
the oppressed, believed in the special destiny of 
their race and their essential superiority to the 
Gentiles. The Greeks, the " nations " or "Gen- 
tiles" (Greek sdvrf) represented all who were not 
Jewish and were therefore looked down upon as 
foreigners. This exclusiveness made the children 
of Israel "100% red-blooded" Palestinians. Even 
in Galilee where many Gentiles had settled and 
where Jews and Gentiles mingled freely in the 
daily life of the community, the Jews betray their 
racial pride in the condescension with which they 
advise Jesus to heal the centurion's servant be- 



20 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

cause the centurion had built a synagogue. Peter, 
a Galilean, had a perfectly definite change in his 
point of view before he was willing to heed the 
call of a Gentile inquirer. 

In relation to the Samaritans the racial pride 
had blossomed into positive dislike and antago- 
nism. They were a mixed stock of Jews and Gen- 
tiles, descended from Jews who had been left in 
Palestine at the time of the Babylonian captivity 
and who had intermarried with the Gentile colon- 
ists brought in to settle the land. They also treas- 
ured the Law and claimed Abraham as their fore- 
father, but since the rebuilding of Jerusalem and 
the exclusion of "foreigners" from the Temple 
in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (fifth century) 
they had been cut off from intercourse with the 
Jews. It was said with truth, Jews do not associ- 
ate, with Samaritans. To get the full force of the 
parable of the good Samaritan in these days, we 
should have to substitute for the name Samaritan 
the name of any race of people with whom we do 
not care to associate. To some of us it would be 
German ; to others, Japanese or Mexican ; to some 
of us it would be Negro and to others Jew. The 
separation between the Jews and the Samaritans 
of Jesus ' time was complete and full of bitterness 
and hatred on both sides. 

Below this pride was there a genuine difference 
between the Jewish people and others? What was 
their peculiar inheritance ? What had they gained, 
beyond all other peoples, from their sense of a 
covenant with Jehovah 1 Four points stand out as 
peculiar to the racial consciousness of the Jews in 



THE HOPE 21 

comparison with the pagan world around them. 
(1) The Jews helieved that there was one God 
and that He was intimately concerned with human 
affairs. (2) They did not separate religion and 
morality. (3) Every Jewish boy was instructed 
in the rudiments of the Mosaic Law. (4) They 
had formulated the hope of a new age in which 
righteousness would prevail. 

The monotheism of the Jews was not the prod- 
uct of philosophy but of experience. The tribal 
Jehovah of their earliest days, the Presence lim- 
ited to the Ark of the Covenant, was, for the Jews 
of the time of Jesus, the Creator, the King, the 
Lover of Israel, their Guide and Eedeemer who 
controlled the affairs of all peoples and who would 
ultimately make his own peculiar people, Israel, 
to triumph, provided they were faithful to Him. 
In the school of suffering — Egypt, Babylon, the 
desolation of Palestine — the nation had learned 
when evil seemed most triumphant a stronger, 
more unshakable faith that Jehovah, Eighteous- 
ness, was essentially supreme. 

The essence of faithfulness to Jehovah was 
obedience to the Law. Even from the earliest 
times Jehovah had demanded a certain standard 
of conduct, and the ritual of sacrifice had devel- 
oped not to propitiate the whims of a mysterious 
deity but to atone for breaches in the standard of 
conduct that Jehovah was understood to require. 
Emphasis had been laid increasingly on conduct, 
and standards of right and wrong had risen. 
Along with this, the synagogue had grown up for 
instruction in the Law and for prayer without 



22 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

animal sacrifices. For the relation of Jews with 
one another, the fundamentals of the Law were 
in advance of the customs and standards of their 
contemporaries. In spite of their exaggeration 
of details, their externalism, and the conspicuous 
neglect hy many Pharisees of "justice and mercy 
and faith,' ' the Pharisees had rendered a great 
service to the world in their deliberate exaltation 
of the Law. 

Theoretically this religion of the Law was demo- 
cratic. Every Jewish boy, whatever his class, was 
taught certain parts of the Hebrew scriptures, 
and the synagogue worship was open to all. It is 
clear that there was a tendency for the well-to-do 
Pharisees and the scholars who were learned in 
the great mass of tradition, which had grown up 
as interpretation of the Law, to dominate the 
synagogue and to look with contempt on the re- 
ligion of the common people. But with the per- 
spective of time and in the light of Christ's life 
and teaching, the rabbinical tradition and the ex- 
aggerated piety of the Pharisees seem less impor- 
tant in the life of the Jewish people than the uni- 
versal instruction in the rudiments of the sacred 
Law. The people to whom Jesus came knew that 
God cared what they did and wanted them to do 
right. 

Moreover, this Jewish faith included belief that 
justice and righteousness would ultimately be ex- 
pressed in a new nation of the Jews. Their faith 
in the supremacy of Jehovah and in his insistence 
upon righteousness had developed into a faith that 
Jehovah was able to make goodness triumph over 



THE HOPE 23 

evil in every detail of national life. There had 
arisen a persistent hope of a renewed and trans- 
formed society. The new age which was to be 
suddenly and miraculously established was called 
the Kingdom of God. This hope of a new order 
included for some of the apocalyptic 1 writers 
the hope of a Messiah who should enjoy universal 
dominion. The names given to this leader who 
should come were "Messiah" or "Anointed" (in 
Greek xP tffr ^) , the " righteous king, ' ' the " Elect, ? ' 
or the "Son of Man." A great day would usher 
in everlasting joy for the righteous, for Israel 
and even, in some of the writings, for all mankind. 
Belief in this new kingdom had become wide- 
spread: Only to the worldly Sadducees the expec- 
tation meant nothing since they already had all 
they wanted. To the Pharisees, the hope was col- 
ored with desire for universal obedience to the 
Law, as interpreted by the traditions of the 
scribes. To the common people, on the other hand, 
it was more especially a hope of deliverance from 
poverty and insecurity. The canticles in the first 
two chapters of St. Luke's gospel seem to express 
the Messianic hope of the devout poor. Thus in 
the Magnificat: 

He has manifested his supreme strength; 
He has scattered those who were haughty in the thoughts 
of their hearts; 

iAn apocalypse (Greek dTro/caXv^is ) is a revelation, unveil- 
ing, or uncovering of something that has been hidden. It is a 
technical term used to denote a particular kind of writing in 
which the hope is set forth that deliverance is coming and that 
the righteous are to wait for it in patience. The book of 
Daniel is the great example in the Old Testament of an apoca- 
lypse. 



24 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

He has cast monarchs down from their thrones, 
And exalted men of low estate; 
The hungry he has satisfied with choice gifts, 
And the rich he has sent empty-handed away. 

In preparation for the coming of this new age, 
Elijah, the prophet, embodying the spirit of 
prophecy, was to appear once more in Israel, ac- 
cording to the popular belief. For more than 
three centuries no prophet's voice had been raised 
in Judea. The wise men who wrote the Proverbs 
and Ben Sira in his writings had set forth a high 
social ideal, but not in the ringing words of the 
earlier reformers. There had been no one to call 
the nation to repentance. The teaching of the 
scribes, that righteousness was obedience to the 
traditional interpretation of the Law, had gone 
unchallenged. 

When John, with the aspect of Elijah, came out 
from the wilderness, a social message was once 
more proclaimed in Palestine. The religious lead- 
ers of the Jews had been, for the most part, allied 
with the class of wealth and privilege. It was the 
more remarkable that from a priestly family came 
one who identified himself with the common peo- 
ple. John the Baptist was born a priest and could 
have succeeded his father in the course of Abijah. 
All the ease and comfort of the priestly aristoc- 
racy might have been his. He could have lived on 
income from the sale of animals in the Temple and 
enjoyed a life secluded and protected from the 
squalor and misery of the world outside. But his 
father must have brought him up with a sense of 



THE HOPE 25 

vocation to a harder life. John had been under a 
Nazirite vow since his birth. In the desert he 
may have been in contact with the Essenes who 
lived in settlements near the Dead Sea. They 
were "Pharisees in the superlative degree" and 
practiced the strictest asceticism, but John cannot 
be called an Essene. The members of that monas- 
tic order were vegetarians while John ate locusts, 
the food of the poor. His choice of this article of 
food and of honey from wild bees, of coarse clothes 
made of camel 's hair with a waist-cloth of leather, 
marked his identification with the poorest people. 
In his long hours of prayer and meditation, 
John had seen clearly the injustice of oppression 
in Judea, and connected its evils with the glorious 
hope of a new day which should dawn for Israel. 
Before the people could be ready for this new day, 
there must be sincere penitence for the sins of the 
nation and a change of heart that should mean a 
turning toward justice, mercy, and faithfulness. 
Individuals, groups in society, and the nation as 
a whole, must share in this repentance. With the 
purpose of " turning the disobedient to the wis- 
dom of the just, to make a people ready and pre- 
pared for the Lord," John began his work. His 
preaching was at first so popular that people of 
all classes came to hear him. It required moral 
courage to face the crowd with the words, You 
brood of vipers, for among them were the Temple 
authorities and the other religious leaders of the 
nation, and they were not accustomed to hear any 
one question their righteousness. When the 



26 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

crowds, stirred by the call to repentance, asked 
what they could do to show their sincerity in the 
new life, John faced frankly the unequal distribu- 
tion of possessions. "Let every one who pos- 
sesses two shirts share with him that has none, 
and let him that has food do likewise. ' ' It seemed 
to him a simple and obvious necessity to do away 
with the glaring contrast between those who had 
more than they needed and those who had not 
enough for subsistence. 

Tax-gatherers who had been trying to gain as 
much as possible for the magnates who hired them 
were met with the brief command, "Never exact 
more than your fixed rate." Eoman soldiers ask- 
ing, "And we, what are we to do?" were an- 
swered, "Never extort money, never lay a false 
charge, but be content with your pay. ' ' The evils, 
then, against which John preached were greed for 
wealth, oppression of the poor and weak, and un- 
just distribution of privileges. The social condi- 
tions of Judea provided for organized selfishness. 
It was this "individual self-interest massed into 
a group selfishness" that the Baptist denounced. 
He pointed out their sin and then to each group of 
people he gave positive instructions for a new 
way of life. More than mere preaching, also, was 
the significant rite of baptism as an outward and 
visible sign of repentance and as a symbol of in- 
itiation into a new movement. Those who con- 
fessed their sins and were taken down into the 
river came out with a feeling that the past was be- 
hind them and that they could begin again in new- 
ness of life. 



THE HOPE 27 

But just as in all ages the leaders who dare to 
speak out freely, in concrete terms, against the 
organized selfishness of their own time, have been 
suppressed, imprisoned, and even put to death, 
so John the Baptist was silenced by those who 
were in control. It may not have been Herod 
alone who moved against John. The authorities 
who had been publicly rebuked by the preacher 
for oppression and injustice would naturally have 
watched for an opportunity to do him harm. 
Josephus records, " Herod who feared lest the 
great influence John had over the people might 
put it into his power and inclination to raise a re- 
bellion, thought it best by putting him to death to 
prevent any mischief that he might cause." This 
statement of the Jewish historian supplements the 
record of the gospels in which the reason given for 
John's imprisonment is his protest against the 
marriage of Herod and a woman who was Herod's 
niece and his brother's wife. A social reformer, 
with the courage of his convictions, was executed 
by the order of a weak official who was trying to 
escape the consequences of his own folly. A fear- 
less preacher was put to death as an agitator, a 
disturber of public order. 

But John's work was finished. He had pointed 
towards one who was to increase while John him- 
self decreased. The last of the prophets, remov- 
ing some of the obstacles that stood in the way of 
a new order, was the forerunner of a master 
teacher who would make known the principles on 
which the new order could be built. John had 
cried, "Kepent, the reign of heaven is near." 



28 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

Jesus repeated the words and launched his move- 
ment on the enthusiasm of John's. 

So Jesus came to a nation divided within itself, 
separated from other nations by national pride, 
and yet presenting the same problems as the world 
outside. What principles could set men free from 
oppression and strife? What would arouse in 
those on top and in those underneath a passion for 
justice? What power could make men love each 
other until all barriers should be broken down? 
How could men learn that God was love? In 
Israel, as in every other nation of that age and of 
every age even to the present, the great ones of 
the earth were lording it over those whom they 
considered inferior. Eomans were overbearing 
towards their subjects; Jews felt superior to 
Samaritans. The rich exercised authority over 
the poor. Educated men looked down upon the 
ignorant masses. Rulers enjoyed the privileges 
of power, while the multitudes were harassed and 
scattered. Church and State were bound up to- 
gether, and religious leaders were identified with 
influential families. 

The religion of the people, however, contained 
living elements which made Israel peculiarly fit- 
ted to be the nation from which the hope of the 
world should spring. Of all the nations in the 
ancient world, only Israel believed in one God, 
Jehovah, who cared for his people. Only Israel 
looked forward to a new age when justice should 
"roll down as waters, and righteousness as a 
mighty stream." The Jews had been taught to 
depend on God as one who would " deliver the 



THE HOPE 29 

needy when he crieth and the poor that hath no 
helper." In preparation for this deliverance, 
John had preached repentance and started a move- 
ment that had already attracted a considerable 
number of people. There were now many whose 
expectation was expressed in the words, "Unto 
you that fear my name shall the sun of righteous- 
ness arise with healing in its wings." This was 
the hope on which Jesus was to build, supplement- 
ing and transforming it by the spiritual impulse 
of his life. 

But the hope of the new age is still unfulfilled 
and society is still organized on the basis of selfish- 
ness. "Whatever our conception of the Kingdom of 
God, we agree that the Kingdom of God has not 
yet conquered the kingdoms of this world. Many 
have turned away from Jesus as a visionary who 
failed. Others believe that in Jesus Christ we 
have still the hope of the world, but that Christians 
have not followed the way of Jesus. For nineteen 
centuries, they say, Christians have had oppor- 
tunity to overcome evil with good and to realize 
the hope of a new age, but instead they have 
drifted, while the old contrasts between riches and 
poverty, the old strife for power, the old hatreds 
of races have reappeared under new forms. Or, 
as the saying goes, Christianity has never been 
tried. We know this is not wholly true, for we> 
have experienced the power of Christ in our inner 
struggles; we know that our souls are nourished 
by the sacrament ; we know that Christianity is a 
living religion. 

We may leave to others analysis of the interplay 



SO JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

of conscious idealism and material interest by 
which the race has outgrown slavery (except in 
prisons) and learned, theoretically, the value of 
each individual soul and the principle of political 
democracy. But one insistent question faces us 
when we read the gospels, pursues us as we see the 
contrasts in our cities, haunts us when we remem- 
ber the millions killed and maimed and starved 
by the war: What visible witness are Christians 
bearing today to the way of Christ in the appar- 
ently impersonal but actually powerful relation- 
ships that make the web of our industrial and na- 
tional fabric? Are we drifting or are we really 
following where Jesus leads ? Will the new forms 
which are shaping themselves in the struggles 
about us be a new kind of organized selfishness or 
will they express the spirit of Christ? Have we 
nothing to offer that is better than the plans of 
non-Christian revolutionists? 

In the challenge of the world's confusion, we 
may well renew our study of the earthly life of 
Jesus that we may more clearly understand his 
dominating purpose, his method of approach to 
injustice, his conflict with the established order, 
and his personal decisions at various crises in 
his life. 

Questions for Discussion 

1. Do you agree with the statement that the roots of 
the evils in Palestine, when Jesus came, and in our 
own country now are the same, — desire for riches, 
love of power, and pride of race? If not, how would 
you analyze the evils then and the evils now? 



THE HOPE 81 

List the principles of the Kingdom of God which 
are already expressed in our social, economic, or 
political structure: 

a. Principles common to Judea in the first cen- 
tury and the United States in the twentieth 
century. 
&. Principles adopted since the coming of Christ. 



Chapter Two 
WITH THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH 

The years at Nazareth when Jesus lived at home 
and the qualities of mind He had developed before 
coming out into public life are full of significance 
for us. As typical of what home life might be, as 
full of suggestion for our own mental discipline 
and for the aims of education, they are of uni- 
versal application. And if we desire to have our 
children bring to their adult life in the community 
the purposes and qualities of Jesus Christ, we 
may well test our home life by the home from 
which Jesus came, and our efforts at education, 
at home and at school, by the qualities which Jesus 
brought to his public work. 

The gospels give us indirectly a good deal of 
information about the home at Nazareth. 1 It was 
supported by a working-man's earnings. Mary, 
at the time of her purification after childbirth, 2 
offered the "pair of turtledoves or two young 
pigeons' ' permitted for the poor, instead of the 
lamb and one turtledove or young pigeon required 
by the Law from those who could afford a lamb. 
The intimate acquaintance with the manner of life 
among the poor revealed in the parables seems to 
reflect personal experience. Old clothes were 

i The following description wa3 suggested in part by The Jesus 
of History by T. R. Glover. 
2 Luke 2:24. 

32 



WITH THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH S3 

patched, 1 and Jesus knew just how the patching 
should be done. The houses of the poor were 
built without windows, 2 and Jesus speaks of the 
lamp to be lighted before sweeping; perhaps the 
home at Nazareth was dark. The rich man would 
not be caught with an empty cupboard 3 and go to 
borrow bread from a neighbor. Only a poor man 
would remember the bargain price of sparrows, 4 
i l the cheapest flesh food used by peasants. ' ' That 
the family lived at close quarters, with the house- 
hold work going on where the children were 
about, 5 is suggested by the heating of the oven, by 
the woman grinding meal, and by the exactness 
of the reference to hiding the leaven in three meas- 
ures of meal. 6 Throughout the narrative of the 
public ministry, we see Jesus living among the 
common people with a natural simplicity that wit- 
nesses to the social stratum in which he was 
brought up. It is only of the rich and those in 
high places that Jesus ever speaks in a way that 
implies separation from himself. His references 
to them as having certain class characteristics evi- 
dence to his own identification with the obscure 
who had neither wealth nor social position. 

On the other hand, the home at Nazareth was 
not of the poorest. The family was able now and 
then to travel up to the feast at Jerusalem. The 
children had enough to eat, and Jesus grew to man- 
hood with health and vigor. The work of a car- 
penter was in demand for the making of plows 
and ox-yokes, and furniture, and many utensils in 

iMark 2: 21. 2 Luke 15: 8. sLuke 11: 5. 4 Matt, 10: 29. 
5 Matt. 6: 30. 6 Luke 17: 35; Matt. 13: 33. 



34 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

common use, and also for certain structural work. 
The garments Jesus wore seem to have been in- 
conspicuous and conventional,— neither the long 
robe with much purple of the scribe, nor the waist- 
cloth and coarse camel's hair of the very poor. 
The seamless tunic and the outer garment with a 
border prescribed by custom and the Law suggest 
a home supplied with material necessities, 1 ac- 
cording to the prevailing standard for simple 
people. 

Material comfort has, of course, been trans- 
formed since those days, and to measure our own 
homes by the externals of the home at Nazareth 
would be a foolish literalness remote from the 
spirit of Jesus. But a principle of permanent 
value remains. The home at Nazareth was clear 
of the accessories that cannot be had by the multi- 
tude. It had none of the badges of social distinc- 
tion, none of the comfort that only means above 
the average can purchase. But the poverty was 
not such as to interfere with health and participa- 
tion in the life of the community. Not least sig- 
nificant is the fact that the household was sup- 
ported by work useful to the community. The 
soundness of such a standard for the testing of 
homes in our own communities — the homes of our 
great ones, the homes of the moderately well-to- 
do, the homes of wage-earners, the homes in our 
tenements and back alleys — can be demonstrated 
from several angles. Both luxury and want in- 
volve undue temptation; physically and mentally 

i John 19: 23; Matt. 9: 20; Luke 8: 44. 



WITH THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH 35 

they are hazardous. Luxury interferes with the 
happy intimacy of common tasks, the "project 
method" in the home which the intelligent mother 
who lives without servants applies in bringing up 
her children. Extreme poverty usually means that 
every one works to the point of chronic fatigue; 
the mother neglects her children in order to earn 
money; leisure for playing with the children is 
unknown and burdens fall prematurely on little 
shoulders. Not only readers of The Survey, but 
any one who observes with seeing eyes the life in 
a city — or in any community, for that matter — 
will think of other dangers, more spectacular and 
perhaps more menacing, involved in a home life 
too far above or below the common standard. 

To measure the minimum below which the fam- 
ily standard cannot safely fall is comparatively a 
simple matter. All would agree that certain con- 
ditions are necessary for wholesome life : 

Housing that is not only sanitary, but also ade- 
quate, in space and in furnishings, for happy 
group life and for distributed home duties. 

Culture material such as books and music and 
pictures. 

Opportunity for each child to have schooling 
as far as his abilities and his interests can carry 
him. 

Sufficient leisure and freedom from fatiguing 
labor to enable parents to spend considerable time 
in the company of their children and to enter into 
their play and other interests. 

Sufficient income to enable the family to take 
part in community affairs such as religious, phi- 



36 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

lanthropic, recreational, cultural, and civic en- 
terprises. 

The well-intentioned makers of budgets for the 
very poor need constantly to be on their guard 
against overlooking, or deliberately omitting, cer- 
tain items as unnecessary luxuries which the 
budget-maker regards as a necessity for himself. 

The dividing line between luxury and simplicity 
is not so easy to define. The family that employs 
one servant lives simply in comparison with the 
family that employs six. The woman who has had 
several evening gowns takes a step away from 
luxury when she is content with one. The man 
who spends two dollars for his luncheon is living 
at a different standard from the man who never 
spends more than seventy-five cents. But all alike 
are living in luxury in comparison with the family 
where no servant is employed and the wife does 
not own an evening gown and the husband takes 
a mid-day meal with him from home. The test lies 
deeper than these externals, although externals 
are definitely involved. In the home at Nazareth 
there was noiseparation from the life of the multi- 
tude. In our»homes, then, can we Christians afford 
any of the accessories that make for separate- 
ness? Must we not refuse, as luxury, the space 
and the leisure and the way of dressing and the 
kind of expenditure that identify us with the well- 
to-do and gratify a desire for distinction from 
the common people? Various definitions of lux- 
ury will occur to any one and few persons would 
agree as to the exact point at which luxury begins. 
At least we can test by a little honest self-exami- 



WITH THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH 37 

nation the sincerity of our desire to avoid luxury. 
Am I claiming as a necessity any comfort or 
expenditure which I should consider a luxury and 
not a necessity for any one else, rich or poor, of my 
sex, age, and condition of health, who is situated 
as I am in relation to parents, husband or wife, 
children, or others for whose well-being I am re- 
sponsible? It may occur to me that I need books 
or music or some costly beauty for which others 
would not care. But how can I be sure that it is 
more important to satisfy my taste in the drama, 
for example, than that others should gratify tastes 
that seem to me coarse and unnecessary? Is it 
quite in the spirit of Christ to wear clothes of a 
costly simplicity and begrudge to others their ex- 
penditure for cheap finery? How do I know that 
with a generation of greater opportunity for edu- 
cation and of more experience in spending, the 
crude tastes would not surpass my own? At least 
it must be questioned whether differences in taste 
that seem to correspond to class distinctions do 
not reflect differences in education and in oppor- 
tunity for expenditure rather than essential and 
unchangeable differences in mentality and sensi- 
tiveness to beauty. But this natural protest of 
one who has been gently reared against claiming 
nothing for one's self that one would not count a 
necessity for others of a different background and 
upbringing disappears in contemplation of the 
simplicity of Jesus. No poet has excelled Him in 
conveying the joy of beauty. No one questions 
the wealth of his perceptions, the literary distinc- 
tion of his words. Do we not confess the poverty 



38 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

of our mental life if we demand accessories of 
culture peculiar to a favored class when Jesus 
was independent of such superficial distinctions'? 
To Him, plainly, there was an unreality, even an. 
unwholesomeness, in the tastes and refinements 
that set the few, in his day, apart from the many. 
The way in which Jesus lived does not suggest 
that beauty is undesirable and material comfort 
is bad. It does make plain that in demanding any 
badge of class distinction, any gratification of 
costly tastes for which others have no equivalent, 
we are misunderstanding the scale of values by 
which Jesus lived, we are setting ourselves apart 
from the common life. 

Another test of our sincerity in desiring a sim- 
plicity of living that shall identify us with simple 
people is suggested by the question, Am I em- 
ploying others to do for me work which I should 
not willingly be employed to do for them? Again 
we need to beware of juggling with imaginary dif- 
ferences of taste. If we are honest with ourselves 
we know that refusal to choose teaching as a 
career if one felt an urgent desire to be an archi- 
tect is quite different from refusal to be employed, 
for example, as a laundress if one had opportunity 
to earn an equivalent amount in giving lectures on 
current topics. Possibly it would be fairer to 
phrase the question thus : Am I expecting others 
to work for me under conditions that place them 
as social inferiors 1 Consider that women of gen- 
tle birth and good education do not hesitate to 
become teachers of domestic science but never 
think of cooking in a private family where they 



WITH THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH 39 

would be Jane or Bessie to persons whom they 
must address with proper formality. (Can we im- 
agine Jesus refusing to any man or woman the 
form of address which courtesy requires among 
social equals who are not on terms of mutual in- 
timacy and friendship?) The fact that men and 
women are still found (though in diminishing 
numbers) who acquiesce in conditions of work that 
set them apart as socially inferior to their em- 
ployers, that in earnings and material comfort 
they may fare better than many other wage-earn- 
ers, and that kindliness and goodwill are often 
present in Christian households, does not alter the 
underlying sense of superiority on the part of the 
employer. Granting that all sorts of differences 
may divide the one from the other, differences in 
natural ability as well as differences in back- 
ground and education, one may yet question the 
importance of such differences in comparison with 
the essential similarity of the desires and motives 
and experiences that constitute human living. It 
even suggests a subtle sort of bullying to trade on 
our real or fancied superiority to others, and re- 
quire of our so-called inferiors conditions of work 
we should resent for ourselves or tasks so unpleas- 
ant that we will not touch them. 

Followers of Jesus who realize that his identifi- 
cation with the common people was a cardinal fact 
in his earthly life and who are therefore called to 
a similar identification with the wage-earning 
class today, are turning away from luxury be- 
cause simplicity in daily living is the first and 
most obvious expression of their desire. How else 



40 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

can they prove to their children that they really 
want to live as Jesus lived! The educational 
value of a Christian home where no social in- 
feriors are employed, where there is no lurking 
pride of family or class and no toadying to the 
wealth or position of others, and where an income 
sufficient for physical needs and a happy group 
life is earned by useful work, seems beyond ques- 
tion. And, obviously, the final test of family life 
is the way in which it affects the children. 

But do we, or do we not, wish our children to 
grow to resemble Jesus? Do we, for example, 
want them to have more respect for an uneducated 
widow who is supporting her children and trying 
to bring them up well than for a cultivated banker 
who devotes all his leisure energy to the collec- 
tion of porcelains ? Do we want them to develop 
such originality of thinking that they will see new 
distinctions between the commandments of God 
and the traditions of men? Do we want them 
to raise embarrassing questions about the source 
of the power by which some hold authority over 
others? Do we encourage them to be loyal to 
convictions that run counter to that which is 
socially correct? Are we prepared to see them 
suffer poverty, imprisonment, perhaps death, for 
an unpopular cause that holds, for them, the hope 
of the race? 

For, in Jesus, identification with the common 
people in the externals of living was the symbol 
of a spirit alive to every essential of human ex- 
perience, which could not be limited in its fel- 
lowship nor corrupted in its thinking by man- 



WITH THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH 41 

made distinctions. In Him the great thoughts of 
the race and the beauty of the world, and the daily- 
loyalties of simple people, and hours of solitary 
communion with the unseen, nourished an unflinch- 
ing integrity of purpose and desire. He tran- 
scends his background, but in spite of his family's 
misunderstanding of the ways of his public work 
we feel that there is no essential inconsistency, 
no miraculous change from the child "who in- 
creased in wisdom and stature and in favor with 
God and man" to the man Jesus Christ to whom 
we turn as the way, the truth, and the life. 

We realize, dimly, that as the son, for example, 
of a wealthy Pharisee Jesus would have had much 
to unlearn or outgrow. He would have had to 
leave behind certain trappings of mind whose 
pettiness is obvious in comparison with the great- 
ness of his nature. Or, as the son of an outcast 
beggar deprived of the religious inheritance of 
the Jews, stunted in mind and body by lack of 
food and by separation from the life of the com- 
munity, his perfection of manhood would have 
been unrelated to the usual processes of growth 
and would have seemed unreal, even alien, to our 
human nature. But the workingman, born into 
the home of a workingman, was not spoiled by 
social distinction nor stunted by want. If we 
feel that even for Jesus the kind of home in which 
He was brought up played a part in his prepara- 
tion for manhood, must we not stress the impor- 
tance of right surroundings, clean of luxury and 
protected from want, for children with smaller 
spirits than his? 



42 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

The contrasts in our communities are becom- 
ing intolerable to many who do not profess to 
follow Jesus. How much more do they challenge 
the sincerity of Christians! "When Europe is on 
the verge of starvation and when in prosperous 
America more than half the babies in a typical 
city are born into homes where the father earns 
during the year less than the amount considered 
by expert budget makers as sufficient for a min- 
imum of subsistence, 1 how remote from the spirit 
of Christ is a life provided with comforts that 
are inaccessible to the great majority of our 
fellow men. Christians who live luxuriously in a 
suffering world or who, themselves unable to en- 
joy luxury, passively accept the contrasts between 
rich and poor as a wholesome or necessary con- 
dition of society are scored by non-Christians as 
hypocrites. For the non-Christian idealist who 
trusts wholly to a change in the social structure 
and who believes that the action of one or an- 
other individual in his own daily life matters 
little so long as the present economic system en- 
dures, knows perfectly that the Christian faces 
a sterner challenge. He remembers, when we for- 
get, how Jesus lived with the poor and how He 
expected his disciples to identify themselves in 
spirit with the needs of the poor. And our non- 
Christian critic is fair in mistrusting the reality 
of a spiritual identification that fails to overthrow 
barriers expressing and promoting separation. 

The spirit of separateness betrays itself in a 
hundred ways more subtle than material con- 

i See Federal Children's Bureau reports on infant mortality. 



WITH THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH 43 

trasts. The labor union closed to the unskilled 
worker; the college girl in an office who regards 
the mere stenographers as a group apart; the 
office force who look down on the scrub-woman 
and the factory hands; the executives distinct 
from their subordinates (whether in a great cor- 
poration or in the smallest office of a civic or- 
ganization) ; the white workers who refuse to sit 
beside a colored worker; the conservatives who 
hurl epithets at any one who disagrees with them ; 
the radicals who mistrust every employer; and, 
not least, the Christians who insist on the sepa- 
rateness of their several churches when it is still 
possible that the sum total of all our truths falls 
short of a complete understanding of Christ, — 
every one will think of other evidences of the 
division which marks a world alien to the spirit 
of Christ. 

A community expresses itself most clearly in 
the way in which it treats children. Do we mani- 
fest here a sense of human unity in spite of our 
failures in the relation of adults to each other? 
On the contrary, our divisions bear a perfect fruit 
that betrays our inmost desires. We allow even 
the babies to pay for their parents' poverty. Ac- 
cording to a Federal report one baby in six died 
within the year after birth in the poorest families 
in a certain city, and one baby in twenty-six died 
within the year after birth in the families where 
the fathers earned a comfort wage. We acquiesce 
in the fact that millions of children are going 
through the years of most rapid growth and form- 
ing the habits which will determine their future 



44 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

without sunshine and open spaces, with no oppor- 
tunity for the right kind of play, without privacy 
and the common essentials for decent living. We 
even pride ourselves on our juvenile courts and 
probation systems (although these remedies 
are not yet universal) instead of insisting that 
children in every home in every neighborhood 
shall have the conditions we know are necessary 
for the physical and moral health of our own chil- 
dren. Theoretically, schooling is available for 
all, but some two-thirds of our children do not 
even enter our high schools and only some five 
per cent ever enter a college. 1 We allow our 
school officials and boards of estimate and county 
and State authorities to underpay teachers and 
set low standards for the qualifications of teach- 
ers ; to offer schooling in rural neighborhoods far 
below the recognized standard for city schools; 
and toiapportion relatively less for colored schools 
than for white schools. Practically every one who 
can afford it separates his children from the com- 
mon herd. We even see separate Sunday schools 
for the select and the "poor." Whether the pri- 
vate school merely satisfies a desire to identify 
one's children with the correct social group or — 
as is less frequently the case — it is sought in des- 
peration by parents who insist on school methods 
aiming to stimulate and not to deaden individu- 
ality, it betrays our failure to create a Christian 
community. For whatever else may be included 
in the Christian aim of education it must be pri- 
marily the highest possible development of each 

i See reports of Federal Bureau of Education. 



WITH THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH 45 

person, not as an individual or as a member of 
some selected group that will grow at the expense 
of other individuals or other groups, but as a mem- 
ber of the human family for whom life means 
nothing apart from its interrelation with all other 
lives. The life of the race demands the best think- 
ing, the greatest moral courage, the clearest vision 
of past, present, and future, the utmost selfless- 
ness and love that each one can give. 

What are we going to do about it? Will the 
challenge of the times to the sincerity of Chris- 
tians in their daily lives, in their relation to the 
lives of others in the community, and in their edu- 
cational aims that reflect their desire for the fu- 
ture, still go unheeded 1 We do not need any great 
new leader to show us the way of simplicity, to 
purge us of pride, to teach us to love our neigh- 
bors as ourselves and to tell us who is our neigh- 
bor. We need only a greater singleness of pur- 
pose; the eye that shall discern in detail the fail- 
ure of our relationships today and bring us new 
light on how Christ would have them transformed ; 
the purity of heart that will make plain the way 
of righteousness. If each Christian man and 
woman desired above all else to share the spirit 
of Jesus in relation to his fellow men — whatever 
this might involve in sacrifice of personal com- 
fort or distinction or in identification with un- 
popular causes — religion would become once more 
a genuine power in the community. 



46 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 



Questions for Discussion 



1. 



Find out the daily wage paid to an unskilled worker 
in your community and compute the amount such a 
man would earn if he worked three hundred days 
in the year. Make out a budget for the division of 
such an income to meet the needs of a family of 
five (father, mother, and three children), allowing 
for each of the following items: 



Rent 

Fuel 

Light 

Household supplies, 
renewal of furni- 
ture, etc. 

Food 

Clothing 

Carfare to and from 
work 

Other carfare, tele- 
phone, postage, 
stationery 

Medical care, includ- 
ing dentist, oculist, 
etc. 



Household help in case of 
mother's illness 

Newspapers, magazines, 
books, classes (self -im- 
provement) 

Labor organization or mu- 
tual benefit fund 

Religious affiliation, social 
organization, etc. 

Recreation, amusements, 
vacation 

Insurance and ether sav- 
ings 

Incidentals 



2. Do you think a social group is justified in spending 
more for comfort and culture than it considers 
necessary for another social group? 



Chapter Three 
IN THE COMMUNITY 

Fifteen hundred millions of human beings live 
on the earth today and nearly one-third of them 
are in countries called Christian. These ' ' Chris- 
tian' ' nations are the nations of the greatest in- 
dustrial development, but some of the countries 
called non-Christian — Japan, India, and China — 
are rapidly changing from an agricultural to an 
industrial civilization. Millions of men and 
women are engaged in the production of goods 
necessary for the life of the world. Society can 
never go back to the static condition of the Middle 
Ages, for speed in production and trade between 
nations are essential to the support of the popu- 
lation. 

In this problem of rapidly developing industry 
in every country and of the interrelationship of 
nations, one issue stands out as clearly as it stood 
out in the simple agricultural life of Palestine 
when Jesus began his work in the community. 
It is still the question of relations between man 
and man, between man and God. What is the 
kind of human life which is according to God's 
intention? What would Jesus say about our in- 
dustrial world to-day? Would He approve of a 
society that means wealth for a few and poverty 
for many, power for those on top and the subor- 

47 



48 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

dination of those underneath? If we are mem- 
bers of his chnrch we believe that his way of living 
and working has something to teach ns about our 
duty in the complicated life of the present. "We 
still turn to one who walked up and down dusty 
roads in Galilee, and ask how his method may be 
applied now in the streets of cities where auto- 
mobiles follow traffic regulations and airplanes fly 
overhead. What was the manner of his life that it 
can still draw men so irresistibly? Why do even 
those outside the Christian Church yet talk about 
Him and think about Him? Why should a group 
of I. W. W., casual laborers, despised by Ameri- 
can citizens, pause before supper, raise tin mugs 
of coffee and drink to " Comrade Jesus"? Why 
should a professor of history who had never pre- 
tended to be a Christian spend all his leisure time 
for six years in writing a book about Jesus 
Christ? 

Jesus can still appeal to varied types of people 
after so many centuries because He showed men 
the meaning of life. Since He lived, we have 
gained our understanding of God from his char- 
acter. We cannot imagine anything in the char- 
acter of God that we do not find in the character 
of Jesus Christ. We seek his qualities as our 
highest ideal. If qualities like his can be devel- 
oped in children by the right kind of homes and 
schools, then the character so developed will ex- 
press itself, as did his, in the crises of life. What 
a man chooses to do at the moment when a de- 
cision is to be made is the result of all that has 
gone into the making of his character. With 



IN THE COMMUNITY 49 

Jesus, there must have been times in the home at 
Nazareth when He put aside his desire to work in 
the world outside and decided to wait. There 
must have been another definite decision to make 
when He left home and identified Himself with the 
movement of John the Baptist. 

John's preaching was concerned with external 
righteousness. Jesus who believed that motives 
were more important than acts might well have 
hesitated before joining a party which did not 
fully express his own purposes. John and his 
followers seem to have been outside the organized 
religion of Judaism. Their way of life was so 
different from the way of Jesus that the methods 
were sometimes contrasted. 1 Yet Jesus decided 
to associate himself with a group of people who 
were removing some of the obstacles in the way 
of his Kingdom. There are movements today, 
outside the Christian Church, working for eco- 
nomic justice as truly as John worked. Some of 
the leaders are in prison. It may be that Jesus 
would identify Himself with the causes that seem 
to Christians so purely secular as to have no con- 
nection with the Kingdom of Heaven. 

What the baptism of John meant to Jesus we 
can only imagine, but as baptism was the sign of 
repentance and the rite of initiation into the new 
movement, He wished to share in this act of peni- 
tence for the sins of his nation. Only now after 
nineteen hundred years, during which the church 
has taught the importance of contrition for per- 
sonal sins, are we beginning to understand the 

iMark 2: 18-22. 



50 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

social sense of sin when one person who is not 
individually responsible for the selfishness of a 
group still gives himself in repentance for the 
society that has not yet organized constructive 
good will. So the baptism of Jesus seems to have 
marked his identification with the nation and his 
consecration to a life that was to be lived for the 
sake of the community and the world. 

How fully realized this consciousness of social 
purpose had already been we have no means of 
knowing. "We can only see that He began at once 
to build upon the common belief in a new age. 
With his desire for a society which should express 
on earth the will of his Father, He must decide 
upon the method He would use. There was the 
method of those in authority who doubtless 
thought themselves justified in using any means 
to enforce obedience to the Law. There was the 
method of those who expected that Jehovah would 
establish the supremacy of the Chosen People by 
miraculous intervention. There was the method 
of the Zealots who would use force to overcome 
force. And there was another method which had 
never been tried ; a way of living by which a man 
would refuse to use his privileges for his own 
advantage, and would repudiate the use of evil 
means even for good ends ; the long slow way of 
teaching love by loving. Tempted to use power 
selfishly, Jesus decided not to be waited upon but 
to wait on others. Tempted to depend on super- 
natural means for the hastening of the new age, 
He decided to teach men that progress would come 
not only by prayer but by natural growth and by 



IN THE COMMUNITY 51 

intelligent understanding. He would love his 
Father, and teach others to love Him, not only 
with his whole heart and sonl and strength, but 
with his whole mind. Tempted to accept the 
standards of the world and hasten the new age 
by the use of violence, He repudiated all means 
that would not develop in men the qualities re- 
quired in that new age. If He would lead men 
to re-think God as one who was free from all 
caprice and favoritism and respect of persons, 
He could not use coercion as his method. To free 
men from fear, to let them respond to the love of 
God as naturally as a little child responds to a 
father who has never made him afraid, this was 
to be the purpose of his work. He came that peo- 
ple might have life and might have it abundantly. 
He meant life in its fullest sense — health, mental 
development, spiritual understanding — the har- 
mony of the whole nature of a person. The test 
of his work should be, Does it bring more life to 
men, women and children? Does it make for the 
fullest possible development of each man, woman 
or child? 

And so He chose a method so simple that a child 
could understand it, and yet so profound that the 
greatest thinkers of the present day are still dis- 
cussing its implications. He cared for each in- 
dividual person. He wanted people to have food 
when they were hungry and so He fed them. He 
wanted every one to be strong and well and so He 
healed them. He wanted people to live together 
without barriers and so He dined with those whom 
men thought they could afford to despise. He 



52 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

associated with fishermen and tax-gatherers ; He 
chose as one of his friends a radical who believed 
in the overthrow of the government. He felt at 
home in the house of Martha and Mary who did 
their own work and yet when He looked at the rich 
young man, He loved him. He was as ready to 
heal the servant of a Eoman military officer as to 
restore the sight of a blind beggar on the street. 
Every single human life was to Him of equal value, 
because He was sure that his Father had no favor- 
ites. 1 No property was worth so much as the life 
of a man. 

We take for granted now that God cares for 
each one of the fifteen hundred millions of human 
beings on earth, and we do not realize how revo- 
lutionary was such teaching in the days of the 
Roman Empire w^hen society was organized on 
the basis of slavery. Yet even as we say we take 
it for granted, we know that we do not act as if 
it were true. The life and personality of every 
individual are of supreme value. Apply that prin- 
ciple as a test of our civilization. Does the or- 
ganization of our social and industrial order pro- 
vide for the fullest possible development of every 
man, every woman and every child! Does it meet 
their physical needs and give to every one equal 
opportunities for education, work, play and wor- 
ship? Does it separate men or unite them? Does 
it strengthen the instincts that make for destruc- 
tion of life or the instincts that lead to creation, 
solidarity and free, happy intercourse? Is it 

iMatt. 16:26. 



IN THE COMMUNITY 5$ 

based on the motive of domination or of mutual 
service ? 

This test of our Christian civilization is ac- 
cepted by the Lambeth Committee report on 
industrial and social problems (Lambeth Con- 
ference of the Anglican Church, 1920): "Life 
must always count for more than property, the 
possession of which ought always to answer to 
some function duly performed. Therefore we are 
bound to condemn any system which regards men 
and women as mere instruments for the produc- 
tion of wealth. ... If a man is always expressing 
the ideals of others, with never a chance to express 
his own, his personality is denied its full devel- 
opment. " And the Church of England commends 
to the thoughtful consideration of Christian peo- 
ple the report of the Archbishops' Fifth Commit- 
tee of Inquiry (1918) : "It would not be unfair 
to say that large numbers of working people are 
at the present time employed on terms which sug- 
gest that they are means to the production of 
wealth rather than themselves the human ends for 
whom wealth is produced. . . . We cannot believe 
in the stability of any society, however imposing 
its economic triumphs, if it cripples the person- 
ality of its workers, or if it deprives them of that 
control over the material conditions of their own 
lives which is the essence of practical freedom.' ' 

Let us apply this test to some of our problems 
here in America today. Does the organization 
of our social and industrial order meet the phys- 
ical needs of the workers and give to every one 
in the community equal opportunities for educa- 



54 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

tion, work, play and worship? We cannot, within 
the limits of any one book of this size, consider 
all the problems of our industrial life, but we can 
look at questions of working hours, monotony in 
work, unemployment, the management of an in- 
dustry, and ownership of the means of production, 
in the light of the principle by which Jesus lived. 
He lived as if He really believed that every son 
and daughter of God is of infinite and equal value. 
Are we living as if we really believed it! 

The number of hours spent at work each day 
is a vital matter in the life of any man or woman. 
The working hours are usually the best hours of 
daylight, and the condition of the worker's mind 
and body after the day's work will determine what 
he does during the remaining hours of the day. 
If he has eight hours for work, eight hours for 
sleep, and eight hours for other activities, he may 
reasonably be expected, under normal conditions, 
to keep himself in good health. Have we then 
demanded that such a division of the twenty-four 
hours shall be possible for all men and women? 
There is an illusion among some people that trade 
unions and social agencies have already secured 
for the great majority of wage-earners the eight- 
hour working day. As a matter of fact in 1919 
only about twenty-six per cent of workers in man- 
ufacture and transportation had the eight-hour 
day. 1 Many of the women who are now working 
more than eight hours a day in factories must do 
housework before they go out in the morning and 

1 Unpublished computation by John A. Fitch from data pub- 
lished by U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for period 1915-1919. 



IN THE COMMUNITY 55 

after they come home at night. Sunday, or the 
one day's rest in seven, is the only day in which 
to do all the washing and house-cleaning. And 
the strain of the long day in a factory has been 
increased by the demand for greater speed in pro- 
duction. That industry does not suffer, however, 
from an eight-hour day has been proved by care- 
ful statistical studies. 1 Steady maintenance of 
output is often more possible under an eight-hour 
day than under a longer day. Enlightened em- 
ployers have sometimes voluntarily introduced the 
shorter day and have seen the value of healthful 
conditions in work. Yet there are still in hun- 
dreds of factories, in which men and women spend 
a large portion of their lives, the old evils, bad 
air, bad lighting, noise, dust, gases, humidity, and 
extremes of heat and cold, with the resulting ef- 
fects upon the health of the employees. The need 
of protection is more obvious for women than for 
men, but the problem is essentially the same for 
all. The stultifying effect of the long day upon 
men workers was seen conspicuously in the steel 
industry. An investigation of the steel strike 
revealed the fact that about one hundred thousand 
men had been working twelve hours a day, and 
about fifty thousand men had been working seven 
days a week. The report of the interchurch com- 
mission of inquiry states as one of its conclusions, 
"The twelve-hour day made any attempt at 
' Americanization ' or other civic or individual de- 

i Cf. U. S. Public Health Bulletin No. 106, Feb., 1920, Fatigue 
and Efficiency, and British Ministry of Munitions, Health of 
Munition Workers, 1916. 



56 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

velopment for one-half of all immigrant steel 
workers arithmetically impossible." x 

The professional man who argues, "I work 
more than eight hours a day. Why shouldn't the 
laborer ?" has no conception of the difference be- 
tween work that is the expression of a man's 
whole personality and monotonous labor in which 
a man has no personal interest. It is obvious 
that for greater efficiency in production, there 
must be such division of labor that the individual 
worker has only one small share in the manufac- 
ture of an article. That it is possible to make 
even this small share stimulate the creative in- 
stinct in a man is being proved by the experiments 
of engineers who are studying this problem in 
industry. 2 And other experiments in certain 
plants are showing that if the workers share in 
the management and control of an industry they 
are interested even in a monotonous piece of work 
that contributes to the success of the whole under- 
taking. If we apply to this problem of inevitable 
monotony in work the test of Jesus, Does it bring 
more life to men? Does it strengthen the in- 
stincts that make for creation, solidarity, and 
free, happy intercourse? then we shall seek to 
help men find the greatest possible interest in 
what they are doing for so large a portion of their 
time. 

One great industrial problem seems to have 
been directly touched upon by Jesus in one of his 

i Interchurch World Movement Report on The Steel Strike of 
1919. 

2 Cf. Wolf, Robert B., The Creative Workman. Marot, Hele», 
The Creative Impulse in Industry. 



IN THE COMMUNITY 57 

parables, — the problem of unemployment. We 
need not press the details of the parable, but 
clearly the same wage was paid to men who could 
not get work until the end of the day as to those 
who had worked full time. The workmen received 
pay for the work they would have done if they had 
found it. Did Jesus know the terrible anxiety of 
the wage-earner, — the fear of unemployment! 
Today members of trade unions who can secure 
regular employment more easily than unorgan- 
ized workers, report that in normal times ten per 
cent of their membership are out of work. 1 In a 
year of business depression, the number of un- 
employed in the United States has been estimated 
as 5,000,000. Unemployment means hunger, the 
loss of self-respect, discouragement, bitterness, 
and an increase of "unemployables." It cripples 
the worker, but it cripples also the life of the com- 
munity of which that worker is an integral part. 
The problem is so pressing that solutions are 
offered by all who are concerned about our indus- 
trial order. They include the plans of individual 
owners for the protection of their workers against 
unemployment, provisions for unemployment in- 
surance, as already tried in England, and the 
more far-reaching suggestions of those who be- 
lieve in industrial democracy. 

We who call ourselves Christians must test the 
experiments in democracy to be worked out in in- 
dustry by the standard of Jesus, Do they bring 
more life to men, women and children? Do they 

i Cf . U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report 
I, pp. 35-38, 103-117. 



58 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

make for greater unity among people who are all 
children of one Father? Those in authority must 
put themselves in the place of the workman and 
realize the restrictions felt by the man who has 
no voice in establishing the conditions under which 
he must work. This is the crux of the problem 
in industrial relations. Deeper than the questions 
of wages and hours, at the root of all the unrest, 
lies the instinctive desire of every human being 
to be free. The kindly paternalism of the em- 
ployer who provides bonuses, clubrooms, and the- 
atrical entertainments for his employees may be 
resented as deeply as the indifference of another 
employer. The worker has the same instincts as 
the master. He has the same desire for inde- 
pendence. But under the present organization of 
industry it is only when the workers stand to- 
gether in a union that they can have any control 
over the material conditions of their own lives. 
The individual worker in an unorganized industry 
has no means of redress for any injustice that may 
arise. He is hired or fired at the will of a mana- 
ger or foreman who must usually think more 
about production than about the life of any one 
man or woman. Industrial autocracy means pres- 
sure from above. The bondholders expect inter- 
est; the stockholders expect dividends; the man- 
agers expect salaries far in excess of the wages 
paid to the laborers. And in defense against the 
collective bargaining of employers, the employees 
organize for collective bargaining on their own 
account. We may say that it is presumption on 
the part of men and women who work with their 



IN THE COMMUNITY 59 

hands to demand any share in the control of an 
industry. We may say that they are too igno- 
rant to be fit for any such responsibility. But the 
fact remains that by the very foundations of our 
American Eepublic we are committed to the prin- 
ciple of democracy. "We believe that every one 
has an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit 
of happiness. We believe that democracy is gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people, and for the 
people. If the people are not educated to take 
any responsibility in government, then they must 
have greater opportunity for education. Expe- 
rience and psychology are teaching us that the 
very taking of responsibility brings the ability to 
take more. The mind and spirit grow by expres- 
sion. The personality develops as it takes part 
in interesting, creative work. It is only by re- 
pression that the life of a person is stunted and 
stultified. 

Judged then by the principle of Jesus that the 
life and personality of every individual is of su- 
preme value, any mechanical system that means 
the subordination of human beings to provide 
more property for other human beings is unchris- 
tian. Any conditions of work that leave the body 
abnormally tired, the mind dulled and stupefied, 
or the spirit broken, are contrary to the will of 
God as Jesus understood that will. Any organi- 
zation that gives a few men the right to dominate 
over the many does not provide for every one the 
abundant life that Jesus came to bring. It is as 
bad for the few masters as for the many servants. 
Power to control the lives of others and to bestow 



60 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

largesse upon dependents makes for egoism, even 
if the self-love is disguised as charity. It is far 
from the spirit of one who identified himself with 
carpenters and fishermen. 

Recognizing that the spirit of domination is un- 
just, groups of people are thinking out plans by 
which men and women whose hands only are 
wanted for work may yet express their ideals. 
Such an experiment as that of the Dutchess 
Bleachery at Wappingers Falls, New York, is 
worthy of the most thoughtful consideration. A 
Christian minister who is secretary of the board 
of operatives in the bleachery can state with pride 
that the operatives are represented on the board 
of managers and on the board of directors, and 
that they feel a personal responsibility for the 
whole undertaking. "With the more than 57 va- 
rieties of ' industrial democracy' the reading 
public is already somewhat familiar. . . . Even 
where the shop committees are granted nothing 
but the right of appeal over the foreman to the 
management or over the local manager to the 
general management, beneficial results have been 
obtained. ... In order to be vital, however, any 
plan should include representation of the workers 
on the board of directors, the final seat of author- 
ity in company management." 1 Other experi- 
ments similar to this one are being tried in differ- 
ent plants, but democracy can never be fully 
worked out in any one plant until its principle 
is recognized in all industry. 2 

i Myers, James S., Dutchess Bleachery, Wappingers Falls. 
2 Webb, B. & S., Industrial Democracy. 



IN THE COMMUNITY* 61 

This principle raises questions not only of re- 
adjustments in management, but of ownership 
that controls the means of producing what is nec- 
essary for all. The question of ownership in in- 
dustry is a matter which concerns us all. 
Whether or not we are living on income from 
investments, we are all using in our daily lives 
the articles made by workers in industry. If we 
have at one time or another profited by interest, 
then we have acquiesced in the present system of 
profits and wages. Yet our Christianity makes 
us restive when we realize the difference between 
the wage that comes to one man and the profit 
that comes to another. A man gives his work, 
the best hours of the best days in his life, and 
receives back what is often barely enough for sub- 
sistence. Another man gives his money and 
receives back what would be enough for the sub- 
sistence of fifty men. This fact means that we 
place a higher value on money than on the per- 
sonality of a man. People who do not pretend 
to be Christians condemn as unethical the private 
ownership that controls the means of production. 
Should the church lag behind in condemning what 
may seem to the next generation as wrong as 
slavery now seems to us? It is already nearly a 
generation since Bishop Westcott wrote words 
that were quoted by the Lambeth report, 1 "Wage 
labor, though it appears to be an inevitable step 
in the evolution of society, is as little fitted to rep- 
resent finally or adequately the connection of man 

i Lambeth. Conference of the Anglican Church, 1^20, Report 
of Committee on Industrial and Social Problems. 



62 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

with man in the production of wealth as, in earlier 
times, slavery or serfdom.*' We do not need any 
new commentary on the gospel record to show us 
that Jesus would not accept advantages for him- 
self at the expense of others. If we have some- 
thing of his clear self-knowledge we shall not be 
afraid to face this problem of industrial owner- 
ship, to test it by the standard: Does it give to 
every one equal opportunities for education, work, 
play and worship? and to let our conduct be 
guided by the answer we make. 

If, as individuals, we see injustice that is con- 
trary to the spirit of Jesus, then we are bound to 
try and awaken the conscience of all Christian 
people to understand the ethics of the problem. 
It is a searching test that we apply. Can Chris- 
tians exalt themselves and consent to the degra- 
dation of others? Can we claim leisure for wor- 
ship when that leisure is paid for by some one 
who has never had any leisure for recreation or 
refreshment or education? Can Christians ex- 
press themselves in all the fullness of life that is 
brought by social, educational and religious priv- 
ileges, when drudging men and women are too 
tired to think? Can " members of Christ' ' be 
masters and exercise authority over subordinates ? 
Can followers of Jesus own, privately, the public 
utilities on which all the people depend? 

Our answers to these questions will determine 
what we do. An individual may decide for him- 
self that he will live on what he earns by some 
socially useful labor, that he will not exercise any 
authority that makes barriers between himself 



IN THE COMMUNITY 63 

and others, and that he will not profit by the labor 
of other men. If a person makes this decision 
because he is a Christian, it bears witness to all 
who know him that he is sincere, and that he hon- 
estly seeks to live today the kind of life that 
Jesus lived. How much greater, then, would the 
witness be if all members of the Christian Church 
determined so to live! If Christians of different 
names came together in a great gathering and 
openly repudiated wealth and power as contrary 
to the principles of Jesus, the world outside the 
church would be more ready to recognize that 
Jesus was sent by a loving Father. When even 
email groups within the church stand for the kind 
of industrial democracy that will bring greater 
opportunity for life to thousands of men and 
women and children, then non-Christians will be 
more able to believe in one who came to give life. 
Yet we hesitate. We say that the church has 
a social message to deliver on the questions of 
marriage and divorce. We are glad now that 
some of the ministers in days before the Civil 
War were courageous enough to condemn slavery 
as unchristian. But when social service commis- 
sions would consider the relations of men in in- 
dustry as a problem of Christian ethics, there are 
those who say cautiously, "The primary business 
of the church is to deal with personal religion. 
We must uphold the supremacy of the spiritual 
and not concern ourselves with economic issues. 
Our Lord did not take part in political causes." 
We forget what those outside the church are 
more apt to remember, that Jesus was concerned 



64 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

with human life according to God's intention. He 
did not separate life into secular and religious, 
material and spiritual. He knew that men can- 
not talk to God unless they have some leisure for 
prayer. When he was talking of spiritual things, 
he stopped to feed the people who were hungry. 
He had not a good word to say for the possession 
of wealth or the wielding of power. His very 
presence in the house of Zacchaeus made the rich 
man decide to give up at least half of all his 
goods. And the presence of Jesus still makes 
men restive about the possession of property that 
has been called "improperty." When that rest- 
iveness bears fruit in action people will take 
knowledge of Christians "that they have been 
with Jesus." When the church sets herself to 
demand economic justice with the same fearless 
devotion that prompted the early missionaries to 
start forth on their adventure, then she will see 
the Kingdom of God come with power. 



Questions for Discussion 

1. a. In a modern industry the following points have 
to be considered : 

a. Selection and training of workers. 

b. Promotion. 

c. Avoidance of unjust dismissals. 

d. Scientific study of production (raw mate- 
rials, markets, processes and interest in work, 
analysis of costs, etc.). 

e. Hours. 

f. Wages. 

g. Supplemental wage policies (profit-sharing, 



IN THE COMMUNITY 65 

provision against unemployment, sick bene- 
fits, old age pensions, death benefits). 
h. Safety and health provisions, 
i. Agencies for discussion and bargaining (in- 
dustrial representation plans), 
j. Housing of workers. 
Having Christian principles in mind, which of 
these points do you think should be decided by 
the management, representing the ownership, 
and which by the wage-earners? 
b. Should wage-earners have access to the company 

books? 
Does an economic order based on private ownership 
of the means of production violate the Christian 
principle that every human life is of infinite and 
equal value? If so, at what points? 



Chapter Four 
PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 

The emphasis that Jesus places on the value of 
every individual life and his love that goes out to 
every person of every sort is a quite different 
matter from the pagan's easy acceptance of any 
human quality as equal to any other human qual- 
ity. At every step in his life, Jesus showed an 
unbounded faith in the possibilities of human de- 
velopment. But He challenges the best that is in 
us and tells us in unmistakable terms which qual- 
ities belong to the new age and which qualities 
must be outgrown. 

The relation of interior quality and external 
conditions in the teachings of Jesus has been vari- 
ously interpreted, just as the phrase Kingdom of 
God, or Kingdom of Heaven, has been variously 
defined. 1 To some the Kingdom seems wholly a 
matter of inward quality. It is present now in 
hearts that have a desire to follow Christ or, to 
others, it is foreshadowed now and will have its 
clear manifestation only in a life beyond this pres- 
ent world. To some the Kingdom of God seems to 
be co-extensive with the Christian Church, either 
with the whole number of the baptized or with one 

i The four phases of the Kingdom of God presented here were 
suggested by Prof. Ernest F. Scott in lectures on New Testa- 
ment theology. 

66 



PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 67 

or more of the organized churches. To others the 
Kingdom of God means a new age when human 
society will be transformed. Each of these in- 
terpretations can be defended but none seems by 
itself adequate to convey the richness of Christ's 
teaching. The consummation hereafter implies a 
continuation and perfection of a life begun in this 
world. The inward quality must express itself in 
action ; if the Christian quality is genuine it will 
discern the evil in the world and will find a way 
to transform the Christian's relationships in such 
matters as earning and spending, and class divi- 
sions, and national ideals. The members of a 
church, like the disciples who followed Jesus, have 
a better opportunity than others to understand 
his purpose and share in his life of communion 
with the Father; but the disciples faced tempta- 
tion, and Jesus pointed out at various times the 
special sins into which they would be likely to fall. 
They were to be judged by their fruits. They 
were messengers, leaven, light, salt. But the salt 
was to purify the world, and lives carrying out 
the words of Jesus would take precedence of those 
who merely called on his name. Jesus indicates 
that the disciples might fail, but that the coming 
of the Kingdom was sure. Until the Christian 
Church has transformed the world it does not 
satisfy one's conception of the greatness of the 
Kingdom. But neither is the thought of a new 
age on earth adequate to convey the idea of the 
Kingdom apart from the fact that Jesus expects 
the new age to develop as the qualities it de- 
mands are present in a constantly widening circle 



68 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

of individuals who depend upon God in prayer and 
meditation and who find the significance of human 
life in the belief that the essential man is eternal 
and immortal. 

The Jews among whom Jesus lived and to whom 
He spoke had already a conception of the King- 
dom of God upon which Jesus was building as He 
taught. They believed that God would overthrow 
the heathen empire and rule on earth through a 
chosen one, anointed as his special representative. 
The Pharisees looked forward to the supremacy 
of the Jewish Law and a nation dominated by 
guardians of the sacred traditions of the past. 
They did not expect social changes that would 
disturb their own security. The multitudes, on 
the other hand, looked for deliverance from injus- 
tice and an overturning of the power held by the 
rich and the mighty. When we attempt to 
analyze the relation of interior quality and ex- 
ternal conditions in the teaching of Jesus, we do 
well to remember that with this difference in their 
Messianic hopes the Pharisees crucified Jesus but 
the common people heard Him gladly. 

In fact, our division of life into spiritual and 
material expresses one of those half-truths that 
obscure the simplicity of Jesus' teaching. We 
know very well from our own experience that the 
thoughts and affections and desires and pur- 
poses which we might call the spiritual part of 
our lives are a composite to which have contrib- 
uted the standards of the group in which we have 
been brought up, our material surroundings, such 
instincts as hunger and display, the impressions 



PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 69 

that have reached us through the senses, and any 
number of other influences which are neither 
wholly spiritual nor wholly material. And mod- 
ern psychology is leading us around by another 
way to see the unity of personality which Jesus 
assumes that we understand. Did He not indi- 
cate that conditions affect character when He bade 
us pray to be delivered from evil? 1 He refers 
explicitly to " occasions of stumbling" and He says 
again that before the consummation of the King- 
dom "all things that cause stumbling" 2 must be 
cast out along with "them that do iniquity." On 
the other hand, He expects character to react on 
conditions. The new kinds of relationships that 
inevitably develop in a group alive with the spirit 
that Jesus sets forth will naturally create new 
social structures. And a society functioning 
according to the standards laid down for the 
Kingdom of God will express in its economic re- 
lationships the qualities which distinguish citizens 
of the Kingdom. Repeatedly we are reminded 
that the things we do are the test of our disciple- 
ship. We must begin immediately to live accord- 
ing to the principles of Jesus, and we must expect 
conflict with the standards of the world until so- 
ciety as a whole is renewed according to those 
principles. Concretely, what does this involve in 
relation to the three great issues before the world : 
wealth, domination by one group over another, 
and race conflicts? 

The Christian who attempts to apply the teach- 

i Matt. 18 : 7. 
2 Matt. 13:41. 



70 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

ing and method of Jesus to the problems of wealth 
and domination in their complex modern form 
must first weigh a great mass of popular belief. 
If he has been brought up in a family owning in- 
vestments, large or small, or having a social 
standing that identifies it with men in business or 
professions and not with manual workers, he 
naturally thinks of private capital as the means 
by which the development of modern industry has 
been accomplished. The thrift that does not 
spend but invests has made possible the building 
of railroads, the sinking of mine shafts, the erec- 
tion of furnaces for the making of steel, the man- 
ufacture of the innumerable machines by which 
are carried on the production and distribution of 
things necessary for the millions of human beings 
who now inhabit the earth. It is the belief of his 
class that only as a man or a group of men, work- 
ing with the chance of great rewards, can freely 
measure wits and strength against the wits and 
strength of other men and groups of men does the 
ablest and strongest group emerge for the leader- 
ship and management of society. To him it seems 
necessary that as many individuals as possible 
should save and invest, since capital is essential 
for the large-scale production without which the 
race would starve, and he sees no way of procur- 
ing capital except through private investment. 
He is inclined to accept as inevitable society's de- 
pendence on conflict and the desire for profit, and 
he considers that turbulent workers who for one 
reason or another refuse to work, and theorists 
who encourage them with talk of wild schemes of 



PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 71 

economic reorganization, are undermining the 
foundations of society. 

But a Christian can never depend on the current 
opinion of his class. He must overcome an innate 
reluctance to question the soundness of reasoning 
that justifies the material advantages which, on 
the whole, he and his friends enjoy. It is of 
course difficult to escape the outlook of one's 
group. And when the man who benefits from the 
present order faces the development of the world 
from slavery to wage labor and from feudalism 
to industrialism, he stresses the points in which 
the present is better than the past and does not 
easily imagine that the problems of the present 
require for their solution further changes in the 
basis of society. The press does not enlighten 
him for it is deliberately committed to the satis- 
factoriness of the present order, and it does not 
tell him all the facts he needs to know. In school 
and college courses the essential soundness of 
private capital has been assumed. And when he 
chances to learn of potatoes rotting in the fields 
in the United States while people starve in Eu- 
rope or of vast numbers of unemployed in every 
country organized on the basis of private capital 
while millions are deprived of the right kind of 
dwellings, the right kind of food, and the cloth- 
ing they need to keep themselves clean and warm, 
his associates in business, the newspaper he reads, 
and pamphlets and books fed out to the public by 
the possessing class do not encourage him to go 
deeper than the results of war, the disorganization 
of credits, and the unreasonable demands of labor. 



72 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

As a Christian lie knows, of course, that the self- 
interest to which the economic order makes its 
primary appeal is absolutely foreign to the quali- 
ties set before us by Jesus. But he finds many 
ready to assist him in reconciling his religion and 
his livelihood. He may either set business off as 
a separate non-moral realm with which religion 
has no concern beyond stimulating him to play 
squarely according to the rules of the game; or 
he may admit that the economic order ought to be 
based on the principles of Jesus but insist that 
until human nature is changed it must continue to 
depend on love of power and the desire for profit. 
In the meanwhile, he must support a family and 
he postpones indefinitely the attempt to apply in 
his own business life such teachings of Jesus as 
seem utopian and unpractical. 

The opinions into which the Christian who be- 
longs to the wage-earning class naturally drifts 
are less clearly predictable. He also reads the 
newspapers that preach the tradition of bound- 
less opportunity and he has been put through the 
schools that uphold things as they are. He may 
therefore desire only to work hard and climb up 
out of the ranks of wage-earners, indifferent to 
the condition of those less well equipped for 
the struggle than he is himself, and if he succeeds 
he will become one of the most vehement defend- 
ers of the present system. But he may have 
found no opportunity because he has been pitted 
against an employer who goes beyond the usual 
standard in hard domination and mean treatment, 
or he may have chanced to come into a highly 



PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 73 

organized trade. Then he will be likely to want 
the organization of his fellow workers in a labor 
union of the older type, not searching the under- 
lying principles of society but demanding a larger 
share in the product and some control over the 
conditions of work. 

Or, again, he may have been thrown with a re- 
bellious group that considers itself outraged and 
disinherited because little by little the working 
class has lost the ownership of its tools; without 
the machinery built by others ' capital their hands 
are idle and their power to produce things needed 
for society is destroyed. He sees that society is 
organized on the basis of self-interest, but he sees 
also the power of class interest. And he inter- 
prets political happenings, court decisions, most 
of the current legislation, the insistence on "loy- 
alty" in school teachers and college professors, 
the continued imprisonment of men convicted as 
political offenders during the war, and the indif- 
ference of the churches to the possibility of eco- 
nomic reconstruction as symptoms of the con- 
scious solidarity and self-interest of the owners 
of capital. And labor unions and strikes and the 
general restlessness of labor are to him symptoms 
of an awakening consciousness, on the part of 
wage-earners, of the fundamental cleavage of in- 
terest between themselves and the owners. He 
tries to hasten the understanding of working class 
solidarity and to guide the struggle between the 
classes toward a deliberate reconstruction of so- 
ciety on a basis from which private ownership of 
capital is eliminated. But like the defender of 



74 JESU.S CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

capitalism he is likely to be obsessed with the 
importance of self-interest. He tends to distrust 
the motive of any employer who experiments with 
new methods of management. He questions the 
sincerity of churches organized in the name of 
Christ but supported and managed by men who 
are actively defending and largely profiting from 
a capitalist order. He sees in Jesus the great- 
est of proletarian leaders that the world has ever 
known and he longs quite sincerely for a day when 
class divisions will disappear and class solidarity 
will give place to a human unity in which the per- 
sonal qualities that he reverences in Jesus may 
have a chance to develop. But he thinks that the 
oppressed workers have submitted long enough, 
and the experiences of the struggle and the philos- 
ophy of his comrades who are not Christians 
(though they also reverence the greatness of 
Jesus) tend to postpone the attempt to apply in 
the conflict today certain qualities that he knows 
will be needed in an order from which opportu- 
nity for profit is eliminated. And he can find 
some solace for his inconsistency in the thought 
that devotion to a class solidarity consecrated to 
the overturning of injustice is a higher quality 
than personal self-interest or devotion to a class 
interest that would perpetuate a system based on 
profit. 

Does any one of these group conceptions satisfy 
our understanding of what Jesus expects us to 
be? Even assuming that extreme poverty might 
be relieved, unemployment reduced and the unem- 
ployed provided for, public interest honestly con- 



PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 75 

served, and in fact all the current evils whose ex- 
istence no one can deny eliminated, can the Chris- 
tian acquiesce in the exaltation of self-interest as 
the necessary basis of society without denying 
the fundamental truths of the life and teachings 
of Jesus? Can we enthrone covetousness and 
think we are serving Christ? 

How completely Jesus understood our difficul- 
ties ! He knew that public opinion voiced by re- 
spected citizens would guide our thinking, and 
that the desire for security in a world apparently 
dominated by evil 1 would obscure for us the re- 
ality of our dependence upon God and tempt us 
to supply our physical needs at the cost of our 
ethical integrity. Poisoned by this " leaven of 
the Pharisees ' ' we would unwittingly deny Christ ; 
even worse than denying Christ, we would deny 
the essential supremacy of goodness. Witnessing 
to Christ might seem to bring disaster, but actu- 
ally it would bring us nearer to God and give us 
a wisdom that we cannot learn in any other 
way. 

For the patience of Jesus, that accepts the cross 
for Himself and for his disciples, expresses a vision 
of our relation to God and our relation to each 
other so clear and so far-reaching that we are 
only beginning to learn what it means. We are 
children of God, a great human family. That is 
good which unites us with God and with each 
other, and that is evil which makes us forget God 
and leads us to draw apart from one another. 
Qualities are tested by their effect on both re- 

iLuke 12: 1-12. 



76 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

lationships. There is that in us which matters 
more than body or food or the beauty of the 
world or the good opinion of other men, and this 
essential "life" grows and survives as it seeks 
to contribute to the life of the human family the 
desire for God and the desire for human unity 
in God for which it was created. So Jesus tells 
us quite explicitly the kind of persons we might 
be, and if we wonder about any of his words the 
meaning becomes clear when we consider the kind 
of man Jesus was Himself. Like Him we are to 
be poor and clean of desire for things and privi- 
leges; sorrowing, so long as there is suffering 
and injustice and evil ; gentle and loving, not seek- 
ing distinction nor power, not judging others un- 
til we are free from sin; devoted to righteous- 
ness, with a hunger and thirst for personal holi- 
ness and justice for all; actively compassionate, 
with imagination and understanding; single- 
minded in purpose, with no selfishness cutting 
across our nature; strong enough in the spirit 
of love to arouse a desire for unity among those 
who are divided; and proving our sincerity by 
refusing to compromise when we are laughed at 
or misunderstood or actively persecuted for be- 
ing different from those who reject the way of 
Jesus. 

To the wealthy men of his own day Jesus said, 
"So therefore whosoever he be of you that doth 
not renounce all his possessions, he cannot be my 
disciple. " x He told them that the man with a 
niggardly spirit lived in total darkness. He said 

iLuke 14: 33. 



PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 77 

no man could serve both God and riches. 1 He 
told a story abont the men who insulted their 
host by staying away from the supper after they 
had accepted his invitation ; 2 and the reasons that 
sound trivial and impossible for such a failure in 
courtesy are still a true parable for the excuses 
that church members make to themselves for fail- 
ure to serve God. To the man who thought him- 
self defrauded of his inheritance, 3 Jesus gave the 
principle, Beware of covetousness. Much energy 
and centuries of failure have gone into an effort 
to "spiritualize" these words. And proof texts 
are adduced to show that Jesus did not mean 
them after all. But consider his own way of 
life, persecuted by the wealthy and powerful. We 
know how He dwelt on the importance of doing 
instead of merely feeling and talking. And we 
must know, if we are quite honest with ourselves, 
that Jesus not only meant what He said about 
riches but tried to make his disciples see that 
they could not afford to be rich because posses- 
sions tend to separate men. The desire to pos- 
sess is in direct conflict with the desire to share. 
Keeping possession of that which another needs 
is a direct contradiction of love. 

And wealth means power. It may come as the 
reward of ability or it may come through cir- 
cumstances. Many <are saying that it comes today 
only through an unjust division of the product 
of labor. In any case, it means power; oppor- 
tunity to seem generous without sacrificing secur- 
ity; opportunity to support "causes" or to in- 

iMatt. 6:23. 2 Luke 14: 16-24. 3 Luke 12: 13-15. 



78 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

dulge in luxury as the fancy prefers ; opportunity 
to develop one's individuality and work deliber- 
ately for leadership. But assume the best use 
of wealth and power; how do they fit with the 
way of Jesus! "I am in the midst of you as he 
that serveth." "The kings of the Gentiles have 
lordship over them ; and they that have authority 
over them claim the title ' Benef actor.' * But ye 
shall not be so : but he that is the greater among 
you, let him prove himself to be the attendant; 
and he that is chief, as he that doth serve. " " Ex- 
cept ye turn, and become as little children, ye 
shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of 
heaven. ' ' 2 Is it enough to use the power of 
wealth beneficently? Can we prove that we are 
servants when we retain wealth that makes us 
masters? 

The race conflicts of today are embittered by 
the poisons of greed and desire for power. As 
we see more clearly that our business world is 
athirst not for righteousness but for profits, and 
as we follow the trail of this motive out through 
the corruption in government, through the hidden 
springs of secret diplomacy, through the fine 
words of national defense, through the noble pose 
of the white man's burden, we begin to see how 
far we are from the human unity for which Jesus 
Christ lived and died. We are unable as yet to 
know the true nature of our brothers; we are 
hindered from learning their inner history, their 
group purposes, their aspirations. A people is 
represented to us as a deadly competitor for 

i Luke 22 : 24-27. 2 Matt. 18 : 3. 



PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 79 

empire; as a turbulent, incompetent rebel; as a 
swarthy giant that must be kept dozing lest it 
disturb those who rule because they hold letters 
patent from the Almighty to dominate the globe ; 
as a robber band upon whom fair dealing is 
wasted; as a peril, because it is yellow; or as a 
devil, because it is bolshevik. We white people 
do not even face the facts -about Negro citizens 
in this country, but we overlook the injustices 
from which they continually suffer and the great 
strides of progress they have made; we magnify 
tenfold their immorality and their lawlessness, 
while we tolerate among ourselves a double 
standard of morals for men and women and a 
mob spirit that aggressively defies the principles 
of our Constitution. Like the Jews in Palestine 
and like every other nation the world has known, 
we assume, each of us, the superiority of our own 
group to other groups. 

This contempt is fanned now and then into a 
fury of war, and "Christians" join in the killing. 
Jesus had much to say to the Jews about the 
faith of the Gentiles and the part they would play 
in the Kingdom of God. The conception He had 
of one human family has found its way into the 
phrasing of our prayers but not yet into the mind 
of the Christian Church. 

Dimly we are beginning to realize that the 
group loyalties of the race are capable of a finer, 
more consciously ethical development. This is 
another of the truths assumed by Jesus to which 
the psychologist is now pointing us from a differ- 
ent angle. Jesus cared intensely for the city of 



80 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

Jerusalem, apostrophizing it in sorrow for its 
moral failure. The purpose of his life was the 
founding of the Kingdom of Gk>d. To a trans- 
formed society is the promise of material bless- 
ings. The qualities He lived and the principles 
He taught involve what Eichard Eoberts calls 
"organic ethics/ ' an interrelationship of social 
group and individual in which the group and the 
individual are both morally responsible, both suf- 
fering for the sins of both, each finding life in 
the life of the other. 

Must not the group then consciously construct 
its machinery of living on an ethical basis ? Must 
we not as a nation find the path of repentance 
and confession of sin? Until nations learn to be 
poor and gentle and athirst for justice, even to 
be persecuted for righteousness ' sake, we cannot 
find realization here of the joyous abundant life 
that Christ promises. We do not need to wait 
for the regeneration of each individual nor for 
elaboration of psychological theory on the work- 
ings of the group mind, to strive, as part of our 
Christian calling, to purify the nation's soul. 

Whatever our creed or our prayers or our 
appreciation of the greatness of human nature 
or our hope of some miracle of a redeemed soci- 
ety, none of us as individuals can evade certain 
questions. Do I trust God enough to believe that 
the race can be fed and clothed and housed by 
mutual service without conflict and greed? Do 
I really want to know what I ought to do about 
my own relation to an unchristian social order, 
with the possibility of facing insecurity, alienar 



PRINCIPLES AND QUALITIES 81 

tion from my group, lack of understanding, and 
even physical suffering? Do I share the faith 
Jesus lived and taught that goodness — imagina- 
tive, constructive, actively loving, unyielding good- 
ness — embodied in the individual lives of his dis- 
ciples will rouse the goodness in others who seem 
to us evil and will spread the contagion of belief 
that righteousness is fundamental in the universe? 
Do I expect Christ to accomplish without the 
active cooperation of every one of his disciples 
(including myself) the transformation of our re- 
lationships from the self-interest on which the 
world depends to the desire to serve on which the 
Kingdom of God depends? 

Questions for Discussion 

1. List the qualities of Christian character described 
in the Sermon on the Mount and state, giving 
reasons, which you think are encouraged and which 
you think are discouraged by the daily surroundings 
of the following: 

a. A young man who is working up to the position 
of business executive. 

Z>. A married woman with money and social posi- 
tion. 

c. A physician dependent on private practice. 

d, An unmarried woman with a moderate income 
from investments. 

2. Can a Christian consistently live on income from 
investments ? 

3. What motive for work may we reasonably expect to 
substitute for the motive of competition for private 
gain? 

4. What form of organization in industry do you think 
would best provide for the fullest possible develop- 
ment of every individual in society? 



Chapter Five 
THE CONFLICT 

A young loader, only thirty years old, and a 
company of twelve obscure men seem to form 
an insignificant group when we contrast them 
with our campaigns, our committees of influential 
persons, our letterheads, our offices and stenogra- 
phers. Yet the leader expected the twelve men 
to start a movement that would transform the 
world, and establish on earth the kind of brother- 
hood that would express the will of a loving 
Father. He expected them to change the accepted 
standards of a society in which claims to distinc- 
tion were based upon wealth and power and racial 
superiority. They were to bring about a funda- 
mental change, not by force of arms, but by the 
firm, quiet persistence of united action. They 
were to act as leaven until all society was per- 
meated and transformed by the new life. He Him- 
self would show them the way by meeting with 
a free, clear spirit the prejudices of those who 
lived by tradition. He would bear no grudge 
against the persons with whom He disagreed, but 
He would define openly the issue between his 
way and theirs, and trust his followers to choose 
as He chose. 

So Jesus defined the issue as a problem of covet- 
busness, of desire for domination, and of race 

82 



THE CONFLICT 83 

prejudice. He would reveal to the people who 
expected deliverance from poverty and the putting 
down of the mighty from their seats how they 
could find justice and mercy and faith. As a 
man among those underneath, He would lead men, 
without bitterness or hatred of persons, to oppose 
wealth and power and pride. He would not sep- 
arate life into compartments, because his Father 
saw human life as a whole. The relation of a 
man to his neighbor should be the outward and 
visible sign of his attitude towards God. 

If Jesus had not been ready for the conflict 
between his new way and the old traditions, He 
would not have joined such a revolutionary move- 
ment as that of John the Baptist. John was 
preaching against an established order which pro- 
tected property at the expense of life. One who 
thought clearly, as Jesus did, could not have mis- 
taken the signs of the times. He must have known 
that a leader who talked as John talked would 
be regarded by the authorities as a dangerous 
character. If another leader, greater than John, 
should live and teach in protest against the status 
quo, he too would be a marked man. But Jesus 
let his name be associated with John's and so 
made his choice between a life of security and a 
life of conflict. 

Almost immediately the new teacher encoun- 
tered the prejudices of those who had known Him 
in his youth. He went back to the place where 
He had been brought up, and preached against the 
exclusiveness of racial superiority. Prominent 
men of Nazareth, in the front seats of the syna- 



«4 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

gogue, must have shaken their heads at the ef- 
frontery of the young upstart. He was daring 
to compare them to Jews in history who had been 
judged less worthy than heathen to receive bene- 
fits from God. 1 Such a sermon from a stranger 
would have been offensive enough, but from a 
carpenter whom they knew it was intolerable. 
They sprang up, hurried Him out of the building, 
and would have subjected Him to what was known 
as the "rebel's beating," 2 but He made his way 
through them and was gone. 

Whenever Jesus spoke or acted in protest 
against pride of race, prominent Jews resented 
what He said and did. That He should dine with 
tax-gatherers and social outcasts ought to prove, 
they thought, what kind of man He was. There 
was soon much talk about him at the capital; the 
people were misled by a demogogue who associ- 
ated with foreigners and with men who were os- 
tracized from good society. It was when he dared 
to predict that other nations might be more ready 
for the Kingdom than the Chosen People that 
he was warned of the hostility against him. 3 The 
governor of Galilee wanted to preserve law and 
order in his state, and it was his policy to sup- 
press the leader of a movement that threatened to 
cause trouble. The answer of the young leader 
to those who warned Him of his danger showed 

iLuke 4: 25-30. 

2 The rebel's beating was similar to lynch law. It was a form 
of punishment administered by the people without trial and on 
the spot, when any one was caught in what seemed to be a 
flagrant violation of some law or tradition. 

3 Luke 13: 28-31. 



THE CONFLICT 85 

that He understood the character of the governor 
but that He intended to go on with his work. His 
friends said He was mad, 1 a fanatic who was out 
of his mind. Lawyers from the capital said his 
power was diabolical. But He went on talking 
about the men and women who would be his 
brothers and his sisters 2 because they were doing 
what his Father wanted done. He knew how the 
Jews felt about Samaritans, and yet He made one 
of the despised race the hero of a story. His 
followers would have sent away an alien woman, 3 
but He made her teach them a lesson in faith and 
then healed her daughter. "When He defied Jewish 
prejudice with the statement that all nations 
would come into the presence of the Judge, 4 did 
He mean that his Father would not care whether 
people were black or white, red or yellow, Jew 
or Gentile, English, Irish, German, or Japanese? 
It was not the multitude whom He offended by his 
inclusion of Gentiles. It was the chief priests and 
the elders and the lawyers who sought how they 
might take Him and kill Him. 

It was not only race prejudice that He met and 
tried to overcome. He had said again and again 
with unmistakable emphasis that the delight of 
being rich choked the word, that a man's life did 
not consist of his possessions, and that unless a 
person parted with all his goods he could not 
be a disciple. 5 Simple people " rejoiced over all 
his splendid doings." 6 He was the hero of the 
proletariat. But those who " thought themselves 

i Mark 3 : 21. 2 Mark 3 : 22-35. 3 Mark 7 : 24-30. 

* Matt. 25: 32. 5 Luke 14: 33. 6 Luke 13: 17. 



86 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

to be somewhat" saw that He was undermining 
what brought them their special privileges. 
Lovers of money sneered at Him, 1 but He went 
on to tell them a story about the condemnation 
of a rich man. He had directed one of the few 
wealthy men who came to Him to sell all his pos- 
sessions, 2 and had used an illustration of some- 
thing that was impossible in stating that those 
who had money could not enter the Kingdom. 
He did not appreciate as generosity the gifts of 
those who gave out of their superfluity, but He 
praised a poor widow who gave all that she had. 
He had denounced the ostentation of those who 
dressed conspicuously and expected deference 
from others. It was no wonder that important 
men came to regard Him as an enemy. They knew 
He meant what He said because He Himself was 
living in the simple way He told them to live. 
But they did not want to live that way. They 
could not say that his words about riches were 
figurative and not to be taken seriously, because 
a group of people did follow Him and accept his 
standards. So they must protect their interests 
against Him in some other way. They said He 
was breaking the Law ; He was breaking the Law 
as they interpreted that Law. His young free 
spirit could not be held within the bounds of 
meticulous observance. He loved men too much 
to bind burdens upon them. But those who were 
laying on other people's shoulders heavy burdens, 
which they themselves would not touch with a 

iLuke 16: 14-31. 
2 Luke 18 : 24, 25. 



THE CONFLICT 87 

finger, looked at this dangerous idealist with open 
hostility and sent secret service men to spy upon 
Him and catch Him in his talk. 

He had denounced their wealth. He accused 
them also of exercising arbitrary authority over 
the people, and He acted in defiance of that author- 
ity. He questioned their right to dictate about 
the Sabbath. Because they had enjoyed privi- 
leges which gave them important positions in the 
community they claimed the power to interpret 
the Law. Nothing that was contrary to custom 
and precedent could be done, especially nothing 
that was subversive of their authority. But the 
vigorous new prophet, full of fire and enthusiasm, 
let his comrades eat grain when they were walk- 
ing through a field on the Sabbath. He paid no 
attention to the fasts which were kept on Mon- 
days and Thursdays. He did not recognize the 
barriers they had set up between outcasts and 
respectable members of the community. He was 
not careful enough in choosing his friends. When 
He deliberately healed sick people on the Sabbath, 
He aroused the wrath of those whose rule He was 
undermining. The Pharisees and the Herodians, 
two parties which had never agreed before, came 
together in their hatred of Jesus as a common 
enemy, and formed a joint committee to bring 
about his arrest. If they could convict Him on 
charges that would seem plausible, they could get 
Him out of the way. Later even the Sadducees 
joined in the effort to trap Him ; 1 they did not 
usually trouble themselves about questions of re- 

iMark 12: 18-27. 



88 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

ligion, but when a man talked against their pre- 
rogatives he became a menace to the established 
order which gave them their exclusive privileges. 
Conscious of this deepening hostility, sensitive to 
the bitterness of his enemies, Jesus still kept on 
his way and continued to oppose their standard 
of external appearances. He let his comrades 
eat their meals without the ceremonial washing 
of hands. He dared to denounce openly the hypoc- 
risy of men in high positions. 1 As a guest in the 
house of a ruler He did not speak smooth things 
but taught his host a lesson in humility and sim- 
plicity. 2 In the very center of the national life 
He condemned a great social evil 3 by an act that 
meant a claim to authority equal to that of the 
rulers themselves. Profiteers saw with dismay 
that if He interfered with the traffic in the Temple 
He might try to overthrow other established prac- 
tices. If He had been alone it would not have mat- 
tered so much what He said and did, but his fol- 
lowing among the people was strong. A leader 
who could rise with a great company of other 
workingmen behind Him was more than a vision- 
ary and a dreamer ; He was a rebel, a revolutionary 
agitator against whom the rights of property must 
be protected. They dared not arrest Him openly, 4 
because the people all hung upon Him, listening; 
but they learned how they could take Him at night, 
in a quiet place, when his few companions could 
be easily overwhelmed if they resisted. And the 
conflict ended in an irregular trial when witnesses 

iLuke 12: 1. 2 Luke 14: 7-14. 3 Mark 11: 15-19. 

4 Luke 19 : 47, 48. 



THE CONFLICT 89 

perjured themselves and the court knew before- 
hand what should be their verdict. 

The bitterness of misunderstanding, of contro- 
versy, treachery, and seeming failure must have 
cut deep into the life of one who had such imagi- 
native sympathy with the needs of men and 
women. Opposition to accepted standards meant 
a conflict in his own group loyalties. If He was 
to lead a movement of simple people for the trans- 
formation of all society, He could not live at home 
with his mother, his brothers and sisters. He 
must trust them to understand while He carried 
out a purpose that meant separation, difficulties, 
danger and at last the dishonor of death as a 
common criminal. His family came to find Him 
as if to claim Him for a narrower circle, 1 but He 
rebuked their "private-mindedness ,, in words 
that may even have seemed, at the time, hard and 
cold. He expected that family loyalty would be 
subordinate to the wider loyalties. A life lived 
for the world might mean misunderstanding, bit- 
terness, and division, 2 but with the "long- 
Handed" point of view he saw that ease and pop- 
ularity in this life were nothing in comparison 
with the depth of love that knew no barriers of 
exclusiveness. He understood the tragedy of the 
age-long conflict between the older and the 
younger generation. Yet He can still teach both 
older and younger what should be their spirit 
in the struggle. He is free from all personal 
hatreds. 3 He can live apart from his mother and 
yet "think of her with tenderness and provide for 

i Matt. 12 : 46-50. 2 Matt. 10 : 34-39. 3 John 19 : 25-27. 



90 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

her future. He can work among men without 
the seclusion and protection of a home, and yet 
draw little children to Him with the understanding 
of a father. 

And He can denounce evil in the community 
without ill-will towards those who profit by that 
evil. He is class-conscious among the simple poor, 
and yet He does not hate those whom He classifies 
as rich. But his good will cannot save Him from 
those who fear Him. It is no light matter when 
a man loses the respect of his fellows. Jesus 
went back among his own towns-people, and de- 
clared the truth as He saw it, even though He 
knew that the sermon would bring Him into dis- 
repute and even danger. He might have been 
among the respected citizens of Nazareth, if He 
had not chosen to give Himself for the world out- 
side. Misunderstanding in his own family was 
hard. But perhaps harder still was the loss of 
all honor in his own town so that for the rest 
of his life He was cut off from the familiar place 
in which He had grown up. And it was not that 
He had no feeling for a place and for all that it 
represented. He saw Capernaum as a community 
that might have accepted his principles. 1 Above 
all, He saw Jerusalem as the center of national 
life, a city that might have cooperated with Him 
and brought in a new age on earth. 

Men question whether a person who lives for 
the community can truly love his own family; 
whether a person who cares deeply for the nation 
can at the same time be loyal to his community; 

iLuke 10:8-16. 



THE CONFLICT 91 

whether an internationalist can be a patriot. 
Jesus lived for the world and yet gave Himself 
also for his own nation. He prayed for the city 
that represented the national life x with a patriot- 
ism deeper than any of the splendid phrases of 
generals engaged in foreign wars. He would have 
led the Jews to form a commonwealth that would 
have been part of the Kingdom of God on earth, 
but they would not. He was not ashamed to weep 
over the capital that would not recognize on what 
its peace depended. But He did not consider it 
necessary to teach his followers to despise or to 
destroy other nations in order to prove their love 
for their own country. 

His way does not seem practical now. The 
conflict is the same — between conservatives and 
radicals, parents and children; between affection 
in the family and work in the world outside ; be- 
tween class-conscious rich and class-conscious 
poor; between employers and employees; between 
large nations and small ones ; even between church 
and church. But the spirit of those on either 
side is seldom that of Jesus. The forward-look- 
ing young man or woman is rarely free from an 
aggressiveness that increases misunderstanding 
with the older generation. The conservative tries 
to repress those with whom he does not agree. 
Employers have a well-developed spy system in 
industry, and there is probably no industry of any 
considerable size in the United States which has 
not its " spies" on the lookout for the activities 

iLuke 13:31-35. 



m JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

of labor unions. 1 The purpose of the spy system 
is to prevent unions from getting started and to 
oppose them when they are started. Well-known 
detective agencies have found it profitable to ad- 
vertise their efficiency as industrial spies and have 
sometimes employed agents provocateurs to bring 
about the labor trouble which they had confidently 
predicted to the employer. The so-called "open 
shop" campaign of the winter of 1920-21 was a 
united effort of employers to weaken labor unions. 
The expression "open shop" has a generous 
American sound as if it meant a fair and equal 
opportunity for all. In reality, the usual open 
shop is a closed non-union shop in which no union 
man can get a job. In such an open shop the 
individual employee must submit to the conditions 
of the employer who probably belongs to an em- 
ployers' association and can use the means of 
the corporation to give publicity to his side of 
the dispute. In one great strike the books of 
the company revealed an expenditure of several 
million dollars for publicity in all the leading 
newspapers of the country. People living in the 
very city in which the strike took place could 
not find in their daily papers any word of the 
strikers' case; every article was written from 
the employers' point of view. When meetings 
of the strikers had been broken up by armed 
militia, the public was still wondering how there 
could be such bitterness against employers who 

i Cf. Howard, Sidney, The Labor Spy, Republic Publishing Co., 
^1921. Brooks, John Graham, Labor's Challenge to the Social 
Order, Macmillan Co., 1921, pp. 56-57. 



THE CONFLICT 93 

were known as respected citizens and supporters 
of the churches. 

But the workers who organize in trade unions 
are not necessarily any more Christ-like in spirit 
than the employers who would suppress them. 
Just as there are enlightened employers who are 
honestly seeking to bring Christianity into their 
business, so there are self-sacrificing members of 
unions who look upon their work as a public serv- 
ice. But for the most part the workers reflect 
the individualistic philosophy that is taught 
everywhere in our country, — in our schools, in 
our books, in our daily newspapers, in the whole 
fabric of our national life. If a man can climb 
on the shoulders of some one else he can get 
ahead. When workers with this philosophy or- 
ganize in unions they may still be seeking indi- 
vidual prosperity. They would improve condi- 
tions and "make tomorrow better than today,' f 
but if they see opportunity for advancement they 
do not question the motives of those above them, 
A man has his wife and children to support, and 
he wants satisfactions for himself and for them. 
He wants a home that is more than a shelter;, 
he wants good food, good clothes, theater and 
recreations ; he wants a job that has some mean- 
ing; he wants education — books, papers, and op- 
portunity for culture ; he wants education for his 
children. These desires result from the natural 
instincts of every human being. Those who have 
satisfied them in their own lives are not the ones 
to question the right of any other man to seek 
these satisfactions. If the present order can give 



94 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

a man these things he assumes its continuance 
and does not question its validity. 

Class-conscious workers, who do not think that 
reforms and improvements go deep enough, are 
fewer in number. They are, for the most part, 
younger than the conservative workingmen; they 
are idealists, dreaming of a new day when workers 
all over the world shall be united in the control 
of that which they produce. Even those who think 
them mistaken must recognize the self-sacrifice of 
men who will go to prison for a cause. The class- 
conscious worker has little hope of personal ad- 
vantage for himself in the present world. He 
throws himself into a great movement with a 
sense of the solidarity that should exist among 
all workers everywhere. He identifies himself 
with men of different nations and races, in a 
spirit of brotherhood and comradeship. He says 
unpopular things even when they bring him to 
trial. Probably he does not belong to any branch 
of the Christian Church, because the church of 
his experience has been identified with the pos- 
sessing class. He may even say that he is with- 
out a religion because the religion of which he 
has known has been identified with what he calls 
"churchianity. ,, Nevertheless he claims Jesus 
as a comrade, as a fellow-worker, as one of the 
proletariat. He compares his own hope of a new 
age with what Jesus taught about good news to 
the poor, release for captives, recovery of sight 
for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and 
blessings for the people. 

And what of those who are neither working 



THE CONFLICT 95 

for wages nor employing others? What should 
be the attitude of professional men and women, 
and of people who have small business interests? 
Should the " public' ' take sides today in the great 
conflict between capital and labor or should it 
remain neutral ? But can any one remain neutral ? 
Are people neutral when they read papers and 
magazines which present only one side of the 
problem, when they talk about the plumber who 
will not work on Saturday or about the painter 
who earns more than the teacher? The salaries 
of professors and clergymen are usually so small 
as to mean strictest economy and limitation ; who 
would deny it? But if people are lamenting that 
while the brain worker has too little, the manual 
worker has too much, then they are taking sides 
against manual workers. If people keep silent 
when others are advocating far-reaching changes, 
they are not maintaining neutrality; they are 
quietly supporting things as they are. When men 
and women accept a one-sided report of the strug- 
gle and do not demand the whole truth, they are 
secretly afraid of the truth. Unless the public 
will go back of the daily newspapers, seek to know 
the fundamental problem, and face any sacrifice 
that the solution may involve, then it is assumed 
by both sides, and rightly assumed, that the pub- 
lic is on the side of those who are comfortable 
and who think that all is right with the world. 
There is no such thing as neutrality. The align- 
ment in our country means that every man or 
woman is on one side or on the other in the con- 
flict. 



96 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

If the Christian Church is arraigned because 
she is identified with the interests of the workers 
and if the church immediately denies the charge, 
then she is putting herself on the side that is 
against the workers. During the winter of 1920- 
21, groups of Christian people found themselves 
accused of identification with the movement of 
the working class. For the first time since the 
alliance of the church with the Eoman Empire 
church members were grouped with the men un- 
derneath, and it came about because certain Chris- 
tians, — Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, 
Presbyterians, Friends, and others, — had declared 
themselves about the application of their prin- 
ciples to the industrial order. They represented 
probably a minority of each communion. The 
church may state officially that she will " meddle 
as little as possible, as a church, with definite 
political or economic issues,' ' but her silence is 
then construed, and rightly construed, as assum- 
ing the continuance and the validity of the pres- 
ent social order. If she fears to take the side 
of those underneath because she might alienate 
those who can give largely to her work, then the 
large givers are justified in claiming that the 
Christian Church is, for the most part, on their 
side. And class-conscious workers are justified 
in assuming that the Christian Church, as a whole, 
is against them. Silence does not mean neutrality 
on the part of an individual or of a group. The 
* 'public' ' is not neutral. 

If Jesus were here now, what would He do? 
Where would He be in the conflict? Would He 



THE CONFLICT 97 

keep silence safely or would He speak danger- 
ously? Would He use violence to overcome vio- 
lence, or would He try again the way He tried 
before ? Would He lead men to oppose other men 
in bitterness and hatred, with lynchings, reprisals, 
and warfare, or would He show us that in the 
quest for justice without vengeance we have "the 
moral substitute for war"? One who has seemed 
to try the way of Jesus has organized working- 
men for many years. As a labor leader he has 
taught always that the movement of the workers 
must be without violence. He has shown no bit- 
terness of spirit in any controversy. He has con- 
sistently maintained that the use of force was 
not only wrong but also ineffective and that the 
cause of the workers could be won without force. 
He has shown how violence in a strike defeats the 
very cause it would uphold. He believes that no 
good end justifies the use of evil means, and that 
men should never kill men, even to save others. 
To kill men in order to save property is, to him, 
abhorrent. And so at the time of the Great War 
he spoke against war as unchristian. He could 
not believe that the workers of any country ought 
to kill the workers of any other country. Let the 
Christian people of America read the speeches 
of Eugene Debs, for which he was arrested, and 
the speech he made at the time of his trial; let 
them compare those speeches with the pages of 
the New Testament and judge for themselves 
which is nearer the spirit of Jesus — the spirit 
of Debs or the spirit of those who rejoiced in his 
conviction. Let them remember that it was for 



98 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

words and not for acts that he was condemned; 
those who tried him could find no fault in him 
except that he was talking against war. They 
knew he had consistently maintained that violence 
was wrong, not only between nations but between 
classes. Yet the American people kept Eugene 
Debs in prison for nearly three years. Even now 
he has been released only by commutation of sen- 
tence without restoration of citizenship. 

What if a hundred thousand men, in the spirit 
of goodwill, should take over the control of some 
one great industry? "With a declaration that they 
would produce goods not for private profit, but 
for the benefit of the community, they could as- 
sume the responsibility for that industry. With- 
out personal antipathy towards former employers 
they could quietly manage a great cooperative en- 
terprise. If any one of their number were shot 
down by those who would oppose them, they could 
yet; forgive and maintain their principle of re- 
sistance without violence. If they were overcome 
in one place, they could move to another and keep 
on trying the new way. The leaders might be 
called "mad"; they might be suppressed, per- 
secuted, imprisoned, and even put to death; but 
the movement would grow. The power of such 
group action carried out with constructive good- 
will would be irresistible. It would do what no 
coercion could ever do. By its example it would 
stir in those who now have more of life than 
others a new self-forgetfulness. It would show 
those who seek more life the true way to find life. 

Is it an unpractical dream of idealists who have 



THE CONFLICT 99 

no " business sense"? So was the beginning of 
the Christian Church in the first centuries. The 
early Christians were simple men and women ; x 
"not many wise men, not many leading men, not 
many of good birth, but God chose what was weak 
in the world to shame the strong; what was mean 
and despised in the world, — things which are not 
to put down thkigs that are." Yet the church 
grew, as Jesus said it would. The death of lead- 
ers only brought new life into the movement. It 
was the power of those underneath gathered to- 
gether to take the world by storm, not with swords 
and spears, but in the unconquerable strength of 
love. Is the power of those early days departed 
from the church, or will she bring into the conflict 
a spiritual force that will bear unmistakable wit- 
ness to the presence of Christ? 

Questions for Discussion 

1. If you were a weaver, with a wife and children, 
and could choose one of the following courses of 
action, which would you choose? Why? 

a. Take a job in an "open shop" plant in which 
the employer had established reasonably good 
conditions, but kept control of all the condi- 
tions of work. 

b. Join the United Textile Workers, a craft union 
affiliated with the American Federation of 
Labor, which might promise increase of wages 
and opportunity to regulate working conditions 
in the near future, but which assumes the con- 
tinuance of the present economic system. 

c. Join the Amalgamated Textile Workers, a 
struggling industrial union which is trying to 

1 1 Cor. 1 : 26-28. 



100 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

educate textile workers for the control of the 
textile industry. 

2. If Jesus were living on earth now, at what points 
would He be in conflict with accepted standards? 

3. Under what circumstances should conflict with 
present standards include the breaking of laws that 
are contrary to what we believe to be right? 



Chapter Six 
INTERCESSION 

Throughout the conflict Jesus prayed. No man 
has approached Him in realization of nearness to 
God and dependence upon Him, or in the complete- 
ness with which daily living has meant the service 
of one's fellow men. But this continuing con- 
sciousness and this devoted activity did not make 
unnecessary the setting apart of hours for fellow- 
ship with the Father. The prayers of Jesus of 
which the gospels tell us in detail express qualities 
revealed in his life and analyzed in his teaching. 
May we not assume that the same concern for 
individuals, the same longing for a righteous so- 
ciety, the same profound understanding of the 
nature of God were present in the hours of prayer 
about the details of which the gospels are silent? 
Moreover, we know that the type of personality 
He sets forth verbally reflects his own character, 
and the temptations of which He warns other men 
He Himself faced and conquered ; are not his pre- 
cepts about prayer also the fruit of his own ex- 
perience? 

Prayer is, then, inseparable from living. Jesus 
lived without self-will, and his keen perception 
of other men's sins was part of a great desire 
to help them to live up to the best that was in 
them. Only as singleness of purpose, understand- 
101 



102 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

ing of others' needs, and constructive love domi- 
nate our thoughts and activities throughout the 
hours of the day, will our moments of prayer bring 
clear guidance and power. It is the pure in heart 
who shall see God. It is the man who has done 
his best to repair the wrongs he has committed 
against other men and who forgives * ' until seventy 
times seven" the wrongs others have done to him 
who may seek God 's forgiveness. And these quali- 
ties which must precede prayer are no senti- 
mental unrealities. In the midst of a world based 
on selfishness, we must be pure from selfishness 
and effective in serving. In so far as we have 
shared in unjust relationships, we must be striv- 
ing to the utmost of our ability for justice. Not 
only must we be clear of personal resentment but 
we must try to understand the motives and ideals 
and temptations of alien groups that seem hos- 
tile or dangerous or uncongenial. 

But also it is plain that we need God's help 
to achieve these qualities. As the ideal grows and 
the conflict between the way of Jesus and the way 
of the world becomes clearer, we become increas- 
ingly conscious of failure. Our spirit demands 
confession of sin and greater dependence upon 
God from day to day. Would Jesus have us turn 
away from prayer until we have learned to out- 
grow sin and* to do his word? But He prayed in 
the midst of temptation, and if our effort is honest 
and our desire for goodness untarnished we follow 
the way of Jesus in turning to prayer for guid- 
ance. 

For example, when Jesus became publicly iden- 



INTERCESSION 103 

tified with the movement of John the Baptist and 
faced the necessity of deciding just what He ought 
to do He withdrew to solitude. The gospels do 
not say in so many words that Jesus prayed in 
the wilderness, but they show us Jesus consider- 
ing possible methods of work and from meditation 
on God's way of dealing with his people arriving 
at a guiding principle for his own career. Later, 
as the conflict sharpened and the temptation to 
waver was renewed and made more difficult by 
the misunderstanding of his most intimate friends, 
He prayed again and again, now alone and now 
with the men who were closest to Him. One 
glimpse of these prayers that we have on the 
Mount of Transfiguration suggests a fellowship 
with the Father that included a thought of the 
needs of his friends, recollection of the great 
teachers of righteousness who had helped Him to 
understand God, and a bringing to the Father of 
the elements of the conflict in which He was in- 
volved. 

Prayer for personal guidance is an ethical ad- 
venture, an effort to open the mind to the mind 
of God, to bring to bear on the problems of our 
relation to God and our relation to each other all 
that we have learned from the teachers of the 
race, from the character of Jesus, and from our 
own experiences together. Jesus teaches us a 
principle that a child can understand : Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God . . . and thy neighbor 
as thyself. In prayer we seek the concrete ap- 
plication of that principle. And prayer is a part 
of life to which our Lord's saying, "To whom 



104 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

much is given of him shall much be required," 
is especially pertinent. The man who has grown 
up in the world of the poor, where such experi- 
ences as birth and death, moral failure, illness, 
accidents, and lack of work teach a fellowship 
of suffering and a depth of sympathy and mutual 
helpfulness that those living in security or en- 
trenched behind the barriers of social position 
seldom try to comprehend, brings to the ethical 
adventure of prayer a spiritual understanding 
which should inform his desire for guidance. 
Again, the man with a mind trained to abstract 
thinking, or able in the management of business 
affairs, will bring to his prayer for personal guid- 
ance his best thinking on such problems as the 
relation of classes, the relation of the supremacy 
of the State to the supremacy of Christian prin- 
ciples, the material needs of the world in terms 
of human welfare, and the steps by which the eco- 
nomic order can be brought under the rule of 
Christ. Whether learned or powerful or simple 
and obscure, we are each summoned to seek, in 
prayer, the way by which in the conflicting group 
loyalties of today we can best serve one another. 
We must use in our prayers the clearest think- 
ing and the greatest love of which we are capable. 
To those who pray with a love unsullied by self- 
will, or favoritism, or exclusiveness of church or 
class or race or nation, and reflecting God's de- 
sire for human unity and his cherishing of the 
least of his children, — to them is fulfilled the prom- 
ise of God's spirit possessing us, which is the an- 
swer to prayer. 



INTERCESSION 105 

In fact, our prayers for our own needs are 
scarcely distinct from our prayers for the needs 
of others. Jesus loved each one individually and 
shows us that each of us is personally precious 
to the Father. But we grow in likeness to the 
Father, we become friends of God, through our 
love for one another, and we cannot come to the 
Father in quest of spiritual blessings for our- 
selves if we forget the human family of which 
we are members. In the very act of conceiving 
of ourselves as distinct and separate from others 
we strengthen the consciousness of self which it 
is the purpose of prayer to replace by a conscious- 
ness of God. Intercession is, mainly, an effort 
to see others as God sees them, and in prayer 
that dwells on others with no thought of ourselves 
except in definite relation to them we can learn 
an affection that gives without stint to those about 
us, a tenderness for all who suffer, and an imagi- 
native sympathy and constructive love for those 
whom we do not naturally like, which will cleanse 
our own souls of selfish desire. 

And in a world so bound together by the inter- 
dependence of large scale industry and the ex- 
change of products among all the nations of the 
earth that every man is served by thousands whom 
he never sees, our intercessions must reach be- 
yond the number of our friends and our friends' 
friends; beyond our parish and our church and 
its missions; beyond the needs of schools and 
homes of which we know; beyond the problems 
of our own country to include the needs of indi- 
viduals and classes and nations everywhere. 



106 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

Through intercession we must learn the unity of 
the race. 

The question is often raised as to whether in- 
tercession really serves the persons and the causes 
for which we pray. Does it help them or is it 
merely the reasonable way to develop in ourselves 
a greater desire to serve? Does God need our 
intercessions for others in order to awaken the 
best that is in them and to "hasten the King- 
dom"? But do we need proof beyond the teach- 
ing of Jesus about the value of intercessory 
prayer? Jesus Himself prayed for others. It is 
true that his intercessions for Simon Peter did 
not prevent Simon's yielding to the fear of what 
other people thought and disclaiming his friend- 
ship with Jesus in the midst of a hostile group; 
but did they not perhaps help to deepen his sense 
of shame for this cowardice and strengthen his 
readiness to suffer loyally afterwards? Again, 
on the cross, Jesus prayed that his enemies might 
be forgiven. We cannot believe that this was 
merely a phrase, witnessing to his indomitable 
love but uttered without the purpose of serving 
others. The absolute integrity of Jesus' nature 
would never degrade the act of prayer to a vehicle 
for conveying to the bystanders the fact that He 
bore no ill-will but understood the blindness of 
his enemies. He prayed for others as a genuine 
and important part of the service to humanity 
for which He lived and died. 

And Jesus told his disciples to pray for others. 
Specifically He told us to pray for those who 
persecute us as a part of the love we must have 



INTERCESSION 107 

for enemies. St. Luke gives this instruction to 
pray for others as the climax in a sequence of 
four commands : 1 Love your enemies, do good to 
them that hate you, bless them that curse you, 
pray for them that de spitefully use you. The 
disciples who failed in the healing of a sick boy 2 
were told that they had failed to pray for him. 
Jesus and his disciples did not observe the strict 
schedule of supplications which the Pharisees and 
the disciples of John the Baptist considered im- 
portant, 3 but Jesus took it for granted that the 
habit of prayer would develop as a part of the 
expression of the new life He was revealing. And 
He told them to pray constantly in preparation 
for the world crises that would come. 4 One bit 
of instruction about prayer is especially pregnant 
for us. At one time when Jesus was stirred by 
the needs of the multitudes, who seemed "dis- 
tressed and scattered," He was preparing to send 
out his friends to cover the countryside with his 
teaching. He tells them to pray, 5 and according 
to the part of his instruction that has come down 
to us He asked them to pray, not that the Father 
would prosper the mission on which they were 
themselves embarking but that He would send 
other workers to extend it still further. 

Is intercession, then, the whole of prayer? 
Should we not confess to God, each of us indi- 
vidually, our own sins? Should we not review 
in his presence the qualities that we know we 
most urgently need? There is clearly a danger 

i Luke 6 : 27-28. 2 Mark 9 : 29. 3 Luke 5 : 33-38. 

4 Luke 21:36. 5 Luke 10:2. 



108 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

of drifting into an assumption that others need 
God's help more than we do ourselves. We may- 
be so concerned over the evils in the world that 
we confess other people's sins and overlook our 
own. But to see the danger is one long step 
toward avoiding it. And experience teaches us 
that the more we try to practice intercession — 
that is, the seeing of others as God sees them — 
the more do we learn to discern that which is 
good in other people and the more clearly do 
we see the kinship between their sins and our 
own. The better we understand other lives the 
more keenly do we realize our failure in relation 
to them. The evils about which we pray cease 
to be external matters but a spiritual concern 
of the group in which we are living members; 
their sin is upon us, the beam is in our own eyes ; 
our penitence includes inextricably our own sins 
and the sins of the human family. We desire 
cleansing that the group may be cleansed and 
that we may contribute our share to* the goodness 
that will overcome the evil. In the same way, 
the qualities we desire are meaningless in isola- 
tion. They are important for the life of the 
group and we pray for them effectively only by 
praying about the relationships in which they will 
be expressed. 

Even in thanksgiving we may not think about 
ourselves apart from others. In the one prayer 
of thanksgiving recorded in the Synoptic Gos- 
pels 1 as uttered by Jesus, He rejoiced in the un- 
derstanding of the Kingdom that was growing 

iLuke 10: 17-24. 



INTERCESSION 109 

among simple people and in the revelation of 
God to others through Himself. And to his friends 
who had come back joyfully from their campaign, 
He gave the warning that they should not re- 
joice in their spiritual power but in the fact that 
they had a share in the new life. 

The words of the Lord's Prayer are almost 
fatally familiar. Even new translations fail to 
give them freshness to our minds. But study and 
meditation upon the several clauses can inform 
them with life and reveal how far they transcend 
our daily habits of prayer. For example: Our 
Father. Whom are we including in our thoughts 
as children with us of the heavenly Father 1 Can 
we suppose that Jesus would have us stop short 
of the whole human race f There is a subtle dan- 
ger for us who treasure our inheritance in the 
Christian Church to emphasize our sonship to 
God and fancy that we are dearer to Him than 
other men. A group quite as easily as an indi- 
vidual can fall into the way of dwelling on its 
achievements and losing the perspective of its 
relation to other groups and of their relation to 
God. 1 But when we say, Our Father who art 
in heaven, we are praying not only for ourselves 
and our church but for prostitutes and criminals 
and rich men and poor men, white and black, 
native and foreign, radicals and conservatives, 
Americans, Germans, Eussians, Indians, and Jap- 
anese. We assent to the unity of the race and 
set ourselves a standard by which we should be 

iLuke 18:9-14. 



110 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

testing our words and actions in relation to those 
groups from which we are divided. 

Hallowed he Thy Name. The Name means the 
revelation of God, the understanding of his char- 
acter and his purposes. As Christians we find 
this supremely in the life and teaching of Jesus. 
Can we pray, therefore, for the hallowing of God's 
Name except as we reverence not only his love 
but his hope for the race? Not only his cross 
but the practicability of overcoming evil with 
good? Not only the beauty of the Christian ideal 
but the single-minded purpose of life for which 
Jesus died? Can our prayer be sincere if we 
accept as inevitable and permanent an organiza- 
tion of society based on a contradiction of the 
Sermon on the Mount? Or what will it avail if 
in our actions we place our own comfort above 
the needs of others? 

Thy Kingdom come. Thy will he done on earth, 
'As it is in heaven. Do we really desire the order- 
ing of human life according to the highest good 
that has been revealed to us ? What are we per- 
sonally doing, as individuals and groups, in the 
present conflict between good and evil in industrial 
life, political life, international life? To utter 
this prayer with faith we must be seeking to 
learn God's will about the group problems in 
which we are all involved, and we must seek until 
we find the way in which our actions may best 
serve the cause of group righteousness. 

Give us this day our daily hread. Only after 
meditation on the revelation of God's character 
and the purpose and possibilities of the human 



INTERCESSION 111 

race do we make any petition concerning physical 
needs. The Lord's Prayer reminds us continu- 
ally that we are to seek first the Kingdom of 
God and his righteousness. The form of this 
petition for bread still emphasizes the physical 
needs of the race, our bread, and is quite incon- 
sistent with the satisfaction of the needs of any 
person or any group at the expense of another. 
It calls us to such an organization of the food 
supply of the world that every one of God's chil- 
dren shall have enough. Plenty in one country 
and starvation in another, abundance in some 
homes and want in others, are hideous contradic- 
tions of this Christian prayer. We cannot say 
it honestly until we personally forego luxury and 
strive with mind and will and desire for the or- 
dering of production and distribution of food 
and clothing and the other necessities of life on 
the basis of mutual service. 

Forgive us our trespasses, ~As we forgive those 
who trespass against us. Again the group should 
be in our thoughts. Do we include in our devo- 
tions an examination of the ways in which our 
family group, our parish life, our class in indus- 
trial life, our church as a whole in its corporate 
existence, our political party, our nation, is failing 
to express the spirit of Christ? Are we searching 
our own part in the life of the group? Do we 
understand the roots of the group sins that we 
find? Are we prepared to admit publicly the 
failures of the group with which we are identified 
and to stress the good instead of the evil in alien 
groups? Endless applications of this principle 



112 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

will suggest themselves if one follows this thought 
to a conclusion. But one or two illustrations will 
indicate the contrast between this principle and 
our usual habit of mind. Christian employers, 
for example, might honestly seek to learn and then 
publicly confess the ways in which they have fallen 
short of the standard of Christ in their dealings 
with employees and with the public. They might 
with equal sincerity seek to understand the rea- 
sons for the restlessness of labor, the great quali- 
ties of the working class, the advantage to the 
race of the growing sense of solidarity among the 
workers. And the organized workers might ex- 
amine themselves and make public confession of 
their group sins. They could stress the risks 
carried by the employer, his qualifications for 
leadership, and the reasons why he has come to 
consider his control of industrial power essential 
to society. Again, the Christian nation will be 
clean of pride, admitting its acts of injustice or 
greed towards other nations, emphasizing that 
which is good in others and accepting injuries 
without resentment but returning always good 
for evil. Are we, as individual Christians, help- 
ing to develop such a group penitence and group 
forgiveness? Are we remembering that Jesus 
tells us always to take the initiative towards for- 
giveness, whether we are offenders or offended 
against, and that He makes forgiveness of others 
an absolute prerequisite of our own forgiveness 
by the heavenly Father? 

Lead us not into temptation; But deliver us 
from evil. This recognizes sources of evil out- 



INTERCESSION 113 

side of our own selfish instincts. Our personal 
experience reveals the way in which our rudi- 
mentary strivings for Christian qualities are dis- 
couraged by the lower standards of group life. 
"We would be kindly and forgiving, but national 
pride steps in and turns the kindliness to hatred 
when a German is in question. We would respect 
every man's personality and have no desire to- 
dominate others, but by the public opinion of our 
class we are caught acquiescing in the suppres- 
sion of ideals contrary to our own. And positively 
also environment can stimulate the best instead of 
the worst. Mr. Tawney has pointed out in his 
book, The Acquisitive Society, that the idea of 
service expressed in the standards of certain pro- 
fessions finds response in the members of these 
professions and develops a different viewpoint 
about financial profit from that which is fostered 
in the business world. And physical surround- 
ings affect character. Crowded dwellings, without 
privacy, offer special temptation to i mm orality. 
Boys and girls in dreary barren homes with no 
opportunity for wholesome, inventive play natu- 
rally turn to mischief. Can we, then, pray with 
sincerity for deliverance from evil except as we 
are alive to the conditions that encourage evil and 
are doing what we can towards the building up of 
group standards and physical surroundings that 
call forth the best in every one? 

We return, then, to the point with which we 
began ; prayer is inseparable from living. Asking 
and seeking must supplement each other; the 
promise of response from the Father is given to a 



114 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

life of faith in which prayer is a part, but only a 
part. The conquering faith embraces both the 
goal and the method set before us by Christ; it 
seeks the way of Jesus for every relationship of 
individuals and of groups ; it asks that the will of 
God may possess us completely. If it keeps an 
unwavering loyalty, not to a form of words or an 
intellectual concept but to a way of life that ex- 
presses the way of Jesus, it will receive the power 
that is promised to faith. 



Questions for Discussion 

1. What is your definition of Christian prayer? 

2. Make out an intercession leaflet on social justice, 
with a confession, intercessions, and at least one 
thanksgiving for each day of the week. 

3. Can a follower of Jesus pray "Give us this day our 
daily bread ' ' and accept the present economic order ? 

4. Can a Christian use the Lord's Prayer and support 
any war? 



Chapter Seven 
THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS 

Executed as a criminal, dying a shameful death 
on a gallows, counted as one who had violated the 
law, Jesus, at the end of the conflict, was still 
found praying for his enemies. Throughout his 
life He had so fully identified Himself with the 
needs of others that his intercession had never 
been separated from his daily experience. It was 
so natural to Him to think of his friends, of the 
nation, of the world, in the presence of his Father, 
that in his last thoughts He was concerned for 
those who were putting Him to death, for a thief, 
and for his mother. These last words and the 
whole picture of the crucifixion are so familiar to 
us now that we think of their later significance to 
the church and we forget what such a death meant 
at the time. It was not the honorable end of a 
soldier on the field of battle, recognized and ap- 
plauded by countrymen as noble and glorious. It 
was the execution of one who was counted as a 
criminal, despised and condemned by men. Is this 
the picture of success or of tragic failure? 

Was Jesus, then, successful? Was the method 
that He used effective in accomplishing the end He 
sought ? His way brought Him into conflict with all 
the authorities of the nation, and the antagonism 
finally overwhelmed Him. If He was defeated, 

115 



116 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

then perhaps He was mistaken in the means He 
used? We may reject his method as foolishness, 
even while we accept his ideals. Yet the fact that 
his ideals are accepted now, even nominally, by 
about five hundred million people and are re- 
spected by perhaps as many more, would seem to 
show that his method, after all, was effective. The 
rapid growth of his movement during the first 
three hundred years after his death, the willing- 
ness of early Christians to die as He had died, the 
continuing life of the church even in the darkest 
ages, the modern missionary movement, and the 
new awakening to the meaning of his social teach- 
ings all suggest that in the long view of centuries 
his life was a success. But do we, even now, rec- 
ognize as successful a life like that of Jesus? Is 
it our idea of success that a man should live as a 
worker among workingmen and die, for his convic- 
tions, without any property to bequeath in a will, 
without honor or recognition? "What is success? 
Have the principles of Jesus, the standards of 
simplicity and humility and service, so permeated 
society that no one now need suffer for those prin- 
ciples as He suffered? Have we such respect for 
a man's convictions that we let him express them 
freely even if he advocates changes that disturb 
our comfort? Or is it still true that a man who 
would live as Jesus lived and speak in opposition 
to power and pride, as He spoke, may be perse- 
cuted, silenced, and counted a failure in the eyes 
of Christians, until, after years have passed, he is 
reverenced by the conservatives of a later genera- 
tion? 



THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS 117, 

Only in the long view is such a life considered 
successful. William James could say honestly 
that he was " against all big successes and big re- 
sults ; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth 
which always work in the individual and immedi- 
ately unsuccessful way — under-dogs always, till 
history comes, after they are long dead, and puts 
them on the top." To most of us, the expression 
"a successful man" connotes the idea of a person 
prosperous in business or honored in his profes- 
sion, recognized and admired by younger men, 
eagerly claimed by influential people in his own 
community. The successful class is the class on 
top, the group in society which has had educa- 
tional advantages and is in control of others. The 
successful nation is the one that can boast of the 
most imposing economic triumphs, the nation that 
can sit among the few great powers and feel se- 
cure in the protection of its army, its navy, its 
fleet of airplanes, and its equipment for chemical 
warfare. And the successful church! Is it the 
communion that builds the biggest stone churches 
on the most important streets and can say proudly 
that she has within her membership the few men 
who can give the largest gifts to her missionary 
work? 

We have to acknowledge that it is not our usual 
idea of success when a man is put to death for op- 
position to accepted standards, or when a group 
or a nation or a church lays down its life. Nor 
was it the Jewish idea of a successful Messiah. 
The hope of a righteous age and the expectation of 
an Anointed One who should usher in that age did 



118 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

not include the thought of suffering. The Messiah 
would be immediately triumphant; his victory- 
would be miraculous and complete. The new pe- 
riod would mean the end of all misery and sorrow; 
the King who should establish justice on earth 
would reign supreme over all his enemies. This 
was the expectation in all the apocalyptic writings 
and in other Jewish books that dealt with the hope 
of a new order. Only in one book is suffering 
shown as related to the age of righteousness, when 
one who has not sinned is called upon to die as a 
sinner. In the teaching of the "second Isaiah" 
Jesus saw the foreshadowing of what He was Him- 
self called upon to experience. The prophet may 
have been writing of Israel the nation, typified as 
an individual, and the prophecy "is significant 
... as the profoundest solution attempted in 
the Old Testament of the problem of unmerited 
suffering." 1 Jesus quotes it in speaking of Him- 
self; 2 He was to suffer on behalf of others, as the 
Servant of the Lord in the prophecy. He was to 
wait on others as the Servant and to give his life 
a ransom for many. He could use this prophecy 
to oppose the popular conception of Messiahship 
and to show how He Himself must suffer in the ful- 
fillment of his work. Even his closest friends 
could not understand an idea so foreign to their 
expectation. Yet from the moment when they de- 
clared their belief in his Messiahship He told them 
definitely that He must suffer and die. 3 The im- 

i Scott, Ernest F., The Kingdom and the Messiah. 
2 Mark 14:21. 
s Mark 8:31-38. 



THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS 119 

pression of what He said was so strong in the 
minds of his comrades that they were snre He had 
predicted exactly what afterward happened. He 
must have realized that his own experience would 
be that of the Servant in the prophecy, wounded, 
bruised, chastised, pouring out his soul unto death. 
Jesus did not think of the suffering as failure. 
He had expected it even from the beginning of his 
public life, and had spoken of a time when they 
would be sad because He, the bridegroom, was no 
longer with them. He had been moved by the 
death of John the Baptist who had spoken no 
more boldly than He Himself was speaking. If 
that leader was put to death, then He too was in 
danger. But it would not mean defeat. His con- 
ception of true greatness was that of a servant 
who would give himself to the uttermost for the 
sake of others. To be as a little child was to be 
exalted. If men wanted the place of honor beside 
Him x they must wait upon others and lay down 
their lives as He was to do. They could not expect 
the applause of men nor deference from inferiors, 
for they themselves were to be in the position of 
inferiors. They were to be thankful for the kind 
of persecution that would mean true success. 
Their greatness would be bound up with the ne- 
cessity of suffering. His own life would be vic- 
torious, not in spite of his death but because of his 
death. "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the 
earth and dies, it remains a single grain ; but if it 
dies it bears rich fruit." 2 " Whoever tries to se- 

iMatt. 20:20-28. 
2 John 12: 24. 



120 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

cure his life will lose it, and whoever loses it will 
preserve it." 1 

This paradox of triumph through seeming de- 
feat does not represent, even yet, our standard of 
greatness. The type of hero in history whom we 
have taught our children to admire is usually the 
military general who has overcome his enemies in 
battle. Our school text-books have set forth the 
achievements of kings and commanders and ad- 
mirals in wars waged for the supremacy of one 
country over another. Only lately have we begun 
to tell children the stories of men and women 
unrecognized in their own time yet giving their 
lives in constructive work for the world. Did not 
David Livingstone, John Coleridge Patteson, Wil- 
liam Carey, Karl Marx, Mary Lyon, Susan B. 
Anthony, and others who were pioneers in un- 
popular causes contribute more towards the estab- 
lishment of justice on earth than the officers who 
have slain their enemies? It is a hopeful sign 
when we recognize the patience of a scientist. In 
a recent discussion in France as to who was the 
greatest man in French history, the question was 
submitted unofficially to the people of the country. 
Those who conducted the plebiscite thought the 
vote would result in a large majority for Napoleon 
as the greatest Frenchman. It was a surprise 
when the vote came out overwhelmingly in favor 
of Louis Pasteur as greater than any king or gen- 
eral. Yet Pasteur spent most of his life trying to 
prove to conservative doctors and scientists who 
opposed him the truth which was later to revolu- 

iLuke 17: 33. 



THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS 121 

tionize medical practice and save thousands of 
lives. Shall we never learn from our experience 
in the past and recognize, while they are still liv- 
ing, the men and women who teach new truth even 
though it is something we do not want to believe? 
"When shall we be wise enough to honor those who 
are true to their convictions and brave enough to 
hold unpopular opinions? If we think the time 
has already come when freedom of speech is re- 
spected in our country, then we have only to re- 
member that ever since the war orderly meetings 
have been broken up by men who were organized 
to uphold law and order and to encourage loyalty 
to our American Constitution. Women who were 
to speak at meetings have been kidnaped with the 
connivance of leading citizens. 1 Our Constitution 
provides for the rights of free speech, free press, 
and free assemblage. But the majority of the 
public have allowed such incidents to go unchal- 
lenged, because we do not really believe in the free 
expression of unpopular opinions. We have not 
yet learned to respect those who say and do what 
they think is right, when they hold views that do 
not agree with our own. 

While there are men who will give themselves, 
in spite of persecution, for the truth that becomes 
later the common heritage of all, we shall see 
progress toward the age of justice on earth. But 
if individuals must stand alone in their sacrifice, 
progress will always be slow. When a group, act- 
ing with co mm on purpose, will lay down its life 
for the sake of others, the world will see the has- 

i Cf . publications of the American Civil Liberties Union. 



122 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

tening of the Kingdom of righteousness. Such 
group action has not yet been seen, though there 
have been beginnings that might have had great 
results. For example, the settlement movement, 
when it first began in England, may have repre- 
sented the effort of a group, who had enjoyed 
more of life than others, to give up the privileges 
of seclusion and protection and to lay down its 
life in penitence for the sins that had made divi- 
sions in society. But the sacrifice was not far- 
reaching enough to break down barriers ; the " suc- 
cessful" class kept its security, and in its shel- 
tered position did not share the experience of the 
majority underneath. Nor has the working class 
as a whole lost its life in voluntary surrender. If 
the poor have accepted their position with resig- 
nation and with proper respect for their "supe- 
riors," it has been partly due to the teaching of the 
church which has maintained that the submission 
of inferiors to those above them was a Christian 
virtue. But such acceptance of things as they are 
is not the purposeful sacrifice that will bring in a 
truer justice. 

If we expect sacrifice in any group we should 
expect it of the Christian Church. "With the exam- 
ple of a master who trusted his followers to give 
themselves for others as He had given Himself for 
them, it should be impossible for Christians to 
maintain a prosperous church in the midst of a 
suffering world. To allow, in one part of a city, 
districts which have been described as "miles of 
misery and squares of squalor," while in another 
part of the same city we build churches in which 



THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS 123 

the poor do not feel at home, is a denial of our 
creed. The Church of Christ should be identified 
with the poorest and the simplest people; she 
should be pouring out her life not in the charity 
that reaches down a hand from above but in a de- 
mand for justice that might mean the loss of her 
own prosperity. 

The nearest approach to such corporate sacri- 
fice on the part of Christians has been the mis- 
sionary movement. 1 Pioneers left houses, breth- 
ren, sisters, mothers, fathers, children and lands, 
for the sake of the gospel. Those who have fol- 
lowed them have kept something of their spirit, 
though the life of the modern missionary is easy 
in comparison with that of the pioneer. If the 
church at home had expected of all her members 
a sacrifice equal to what she expected of her rep- 
resentatives on the mission field, the world would 
have believed in the sincerity of her profession. 
But we send workers to the Southern mountains 
to live on salaries that are less than the minimum 
required for subsistence, and then we forget them.- 
Or we send them magazines a month old because* 
they cannot afford to buy the reading matter that 
we have for ourselves. Or we pack boxes of 
articles to send them, when they, like other self-re- 
specting human beings, would like to choose for 
themselves, if not in shops then from the books of 
mail-order houses, the things they need. And the 
church has sent men and women into the foreign 
field to work without reinforcements. She expects 
an American doctor in China to do what a dozen 

iMark 10:29. 



124 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

doctors would hardly attempt to do in this coun- 
try. She expects one missionary in evangelistic 
work to solve the social problems of a whole city 
in Japan. She supports her missions not by cast- 
ing in all that she has but by giving of her super- 
fluity. This is not the sacrifice of united action, 
such as would convince the world of the reality of 
her faith in Christ. But it is not yet too late. 
There is life enough in the Christian Church to 
rouse the sacrificial spirit in her members. The 
opportunity is greater than ever before. The 
openings in every missionary district at home 
and abroad call for preachers, teachers, doctors, 
nurses, and trained social workers, men and 
women with vision and with the spirit that does 
not look for recognition or reward. 

But the church must not substitute the sacrifice 
of her missionaries for that of her other members. 
"Why should she not summon all who claim the 
name of Christian to a great conference in which 
she shall face the fundamental problem of injus- 
tice 1 And in preparation for this conference, let 
her call upon her members to live simply without 
riches and without property power. A leading 
American bishop is already preaching the Ser- 
mon on the Mount as literally applicable to our 
problems now. Christians of different names are 
so troubled about the possession of property that 
they are giving up their security and trying to live 
on what they earn. Let these groups be multi- 
plied, as the groups of believers in the first cen- 
tury were enlarged and multiplied. If this move- 
ment for simplicity is purposeful and is carried on 



THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS 125 

in order to establish justice, it may cost the 
church more than she has ever before been will- 
ing to pay for her ideals. We may judge by the 
experience of the Methodist Church in Canada. 
The reports on social service adopted by the gen- 
eral conference of Canadian Methodists are as 
far-reaching as the statements of any Christians, 
and have already resulted in the withdrawal of 
gifts from a few influential men. But other mem- 
bers of the church have come forward and have 
made up the deficit. Even if the deficit had not 
been made up, that Christian communion would 
have found its life by losing it. The capacity for 
sacrifice is not gone from the church. 

As we look forward to the World Conference 
on Faith and Order 1 when Christians shall dis- 
cuss in fellowship the very questions that have 
divided them, let us prepare for a similar world 
conference on social justice. If a commission of 
one communion, in the spirit of penitence, sug- 
gested that others should meet with it for the con- 
fession of sins and for the adoption of a code of 
organic ethics, there would be many ready to ac- 
cept the invitation. As a result of the conference, 
the Christian Church might find herself arrayed 
against the powers that be, as in the first century. 
She might have to give up her comfort, her beau- 
tiful buildings, her ceremonies, and conduct her 
worship once more in dark little corners of the 
earth. i l Christian ' ' might again become a danger- 

i World Conference on Faith and Order, Continuation Com- 
mittee. Sec'y, Eobert H. Gardiner, 174 Water St., Gardiner, 
Maine. 



126 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

ous word, and those who were called Christians 
might be persecuted and put to death. But there 
would be a quickening in the whole Body of Christ. 
The fire and enthusiasm of her Leader would be 
revived, and the church, in her death, would find 
life. 



Questions for Discussion 

1. Is the idea of stewardship of wealth an adequate ex- 
pression of Jesus' teachings on riches? If not, why 
not? 

2. Prepare an outline of the questions that should be 
discussed at a Christian conference on social justice 
and of the statement you would like to see such a 
conference adopt. Compare your statement with 
The Social Creed of the Churches. 



Chapter Eight 
THE RISEN LIFE 

To the disciples who had seen Jesus crucified 
and apparently defeated, his resurrection bore 
witness of his success. In a flash the perspective 
of the world shifted ; suffering and death became 
incidental; our relation to God and our relations 
to one another became the only things that matter. 
The timid became strong in the vision of Christ's 
victory; the self-seeking forgot themselves in de- 
votion to the spread of his Kingdom; those who 
had added temptation and sorrow to the sufferings 
of Jesus through their worldly-mindedness were 
now joyous in the face of persecution; Jews of 
intense national pride preached to Gentiles the 
victory of Jesus who was crucified and rose from 
the dead. 

The cross and the resurrection have always 
been inseparable in our thoughts of Christ's vic- 
tory, but they have not been so clearly united in 
our interpretation of their meaning for ourselves. 
The church unites them in the mystery of the 
sacrament, when the presence of the Risen Lord 
comes to us in the commemoration of his death, 
but insensibly we drift into the comfort of assum- 
ing that we can share the privilege of the risen 
presence without sharing the suffering of Christ's 
sacrifice. But Christ's victory began long before 

127 



128 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

his soul was free of the body. In his first struggle 
with temptation He laid the foundation of success ; 
He built it up in the conflict from day to day 
through his unwavering steadfastness of purpose 
and method in the face of apparent failure; and 
He completed it on the cross. The resurrection 
does not mark a victory that conquered defeat ; it 
is the radiant seal of a victory achieved on earth. 
The collects for the Easter season 1 should re- 
mind us that we cannot live by a mystical expe- 
dience of Christ's presence apart from the doing 
\of that which is right from day to day. 

And in a world that is yet far from the King- 
dom of God we cannot "die daily from sin," 
"serve God in pureness of living and truth," 
"daily endeavor ourselves to follow the blessed 
steps of his most holy life," "avoid those things 
that are contrary to our profession and follow all 
such things as are agreeable to the same," and 
"think those things that are good and by thy mer- 
ciful guiding perform the same" without contin- 
ual conflict with the standards of the world. Our 
J conflict, like the conflict of Jesus, will mean suff er- 
I ing and disgrace until our group life is true to the 
; highest ideal we have seen for the individual. 
Industrial units, social classes, communities, 
churches, nations, are still far from expressing 
in their relations the principles we learn from 
Jesus, and the day is not yet when our conflict can 
be a merely interior matter, an imaginative shar- 
ing of the sufferings of Christ. 

i In the Book of Common Prayer of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church. 



THE RISEN LIFE 129 

The s elf -gov erning nation is the largest group 
that the race has learned to regard as an ethical 
"unit. It is of significance to Christians as the 
most difficult and challenging practice ground for 
the application of the principles and the method 
of Jesus. In the nation we are members in a 
group made up of opposing classes and of indi- 
viduals of every possible sort. The fact of na- 
tional consciousness is by itself an achievement, 
but long before the days of Jesus the race had ac- 
complished it. The individual was sacrificing his 
life for the life of the group in the earliest stories 
that have come down to us. Slowly we are begin- 
ning to learn that we cannot rest on the achieve- 
ment of national consciousness but that the qual- 
ity of that consciousness is important. But na- 
tions still live selfishly and each in its dealings 
with other nations defends by every means its own 
security and pride. The ' ' second Isaiah" alone in 
the ancient world presented a different national 
ideal. He seems to have conceived of his nation 
as called to suffer, to be despised and bruised in 
loyalty to righteousness in the midst of an evil 
world. Jesus built on the thought of vicarious 
suffering not only in relation to his own work but 
in relation to the Jewish people. He scored their 
pride and exclusiveness ; He tried to make them 
recognize the qualities of Gentiles; He laid down 
principles for group dealings that called the group 
to the exercise of the same great qualities that He 
set forth for individuals. Not only has no nation 
hitherto approached the way of Jesus nor even 
set it up as a desirable ideal, but only a few Chris- 



130 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

tians have dreamed of a nation Christian in meek- 
ness, penitence, and love of other nations, and 
ready to die without armed defense rather than to 
swerve from its quest of righteousness. 

Mingled with our national pride and our use of 
violence and corruption for national defense, cer- 
tain finer qualities — faint reflections of the spirit 
of Jesus — can be traced in the ideals of modern 
nations. Three principles akin to the spirit of 
Jesus are implicit in our common life in the United 
States, but they are limited and perverted in their 
application. Theoretically, the personality of 
every man, woman, and child is respected; the 
group, whether nation, state, or community, has a 
responsibility for promoting conditions favorable 
to health, intelligence, and clean living; and the 
nation is not an end in itself but finds its meaning 
in relation to God's purposes. 

But do we respect personality? Every adult is 
guaranteed by our Constitution the right to ex- 
press his opinions, to publish his reasons and per- 
suade other men to agree with him, to participate 
in political life as a voter and a candidate, and to 
be considered as innocent of crime until his guilt 
is proved. He is to have a clear field for life, lib- 
erty, and the pursuit of happiness. But actu- 
ally men are in prison for their opinions; news- 
papers are held up and deprived of mailing rights 
for advocating radical changes in political or 
economic structure; socialists are expelled from 
legislative bodies after election by unquestioned 
majorities; Negroes are disfranchised in certain 
states, and leaders of unpopular causes are 



THE EISEN LIFE 131 

brought to trial and convicted of violent crimes 
with an openly malignant spirit in the prosecution 
and the acceptance by the conrt of self -contradic- 
tory evidence. In industry, as we have seen, the 
individual wage-earner is no longer a personality 
but merely a hand whose opinions and responsi- 
bilities and desires are disregarded by those who 
control his working life. The passing of the 
earlier age when small factories were multiplying, 
when machinery was far less developed and initia- 
tive was valued in the man underneath, and when 
the opportunities for advancement were relatively 
numerous and the discontented wage-earner could 
move on to the frontier and make a fresh start, 
has left us with the fiction of a free struggle that 
respects personality because there is opportunity 
for all to develop. But this fiction is a dream of 
the past which misrepresents the highly organ- 
ized, autocratic industry of today. We cannot 
too often remind ourselves that political freedom 
is also a fiction when it tries to function side by 
side with autocracy in industry. Experience is 
teaching us the folly of attempting to express in 
political life a respect for personality while we 
trample on personality in our economic life. For 
the habits of mind fostered during the working 
hours, which absorb the best of our energy, will 
be a stronger influence in group life than the 
ideals of which we talk during our leisure. 

But do we honestly wish the free development 
of every individual's personality! Are we con- 
vinced that no group life is sound and permanent 
in which a few dominate and compel the many to 



132 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

submit? Are we testing the impersonal relations 
in our national life by the principles of Jesus? 
Do we in our own relations with others realize 
what is involved in respect for every individual's 
personality? It is difficult to welcome disagree- 
ment, especially by those who persuasively advo- 
cate what seems to us wrong; to be firm in one's 
own convictions and consistent in conduct and at 
the same time genuinely to desire the truth that 
one learns only from others ; to understand and to 
love the fine qualities in those whose faults are 
especially apparent to us and to know every one 
as a person with no classifying label to obscure 
his motives and his achievements; to con- 
sider the essentials of wholesome living more im- 
portant for others than comforts and esthetic 
satisfactions for ourselves. The way of Jesus 
leads us to just such a practical love of our neigh- 
bors in our own living as individuals and as mem- 
bers of the nation. It calls us to strive for such 
social machinery as will encourage this temper 
and forbids us to accept economic or political 
power that contradicts it. 

Our group ideals, already implicit in constitu- 
tions and government, call us to the greater re- 
sponsibility of promoting conditions favorable 
to health, intelligence, and clean living. Our 
freedom is not merely the freedom of an open 
struggle, with respect and a fair field for our op- 
ponents, but rather a freedom of mutual service. 
Such matters as schools and highways and the 
prevention of epidemics, the problem of prosti- 
tution, the saving of infant lives and the training 



THE RISEN LIFE |133 

of child delinquents, protection from fire and a 
standard of sanitation for factories and tenement 
dwellings are now recognized as the concern of 
the group. The community has begun, in rudi- 
mentary fashion as yet, to build up conditions that 
develop the best in each individual. The work is 
in its earliest stages, hindered by the class-con- 
sciousness of the rich, limited by a respect for 
property as more important than human welfare, 
still concerned rather with the elimination of cer- 
tain obvious evils than with constructive plan- 
ning. But the principle is plainly admitted and 
the tools are being shaped for those who desire 
a nation that thinks and is physically sound and 
is more concerned with our common life than with 
self-indulgence. 

Jesus thought every one entitled to health; He 
tried to illuminate for those about Him the great 
thoughts of the Jewish race and to arouse the 
power of reason; He realized the possibility of 
good in those who have grievously sinned ; and by 
his friendship with sinners He makes us think of 
social ostracism and the coercion of criminals as 
weapons of small minds or of a group uncertain 
of its own moral standards. 

Are Christians alive to the problems of educa- 
tion today, when such questions as freedom of 
thought, qualifications of teachers, preparation 
for community life, and equality of opportunity 
for all children of all classes and races, are con- 
fused by partisan struggles and the determination 
of those now in power to teach respect for them- 
selves as the first duty of man? To what prin- 



134 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

ciples of daily living are Christian parents train- 
ing their own children? Does it seem to us as 
intolerable for a workingman's child as it would 
be for our own to leave school at sixteen or 
younger with no background of the best from the 
past and no training to do well something that is 
worth doing? Does health mean to us merely 
keeping ourselves and our family well or are we 
equally concerned that every one should have good 
food, dry, sunny homes, a pleasant place to work, 
good medical and nursing care in illness, and 
happy hours of out of doors? Are we informed 
about the venereal diseases and not ashamed to 
discuss them as a community problem? Are Chris- 
tians taking counsel with each other and keeping 
abreast of modern psychology on the guidance of 
their children in sex matters? Do we really be- 
lieve that pure living is equally important and 
equally possible for men and for women? Are 
Christian parents doing what they can to develop 
not only for their own families but for other 
young people athletics and hobbies and other in- 
terests that will help them to see each other not 
solely as boy and girl but also as sharers in a 
common life? Are we realizing how monotony 
of work and chronic physical fatigue react on sex 
relations ? *^*^^ 

But the field is too wide to traverse now. The 
training and care of mental defectives and the 
provision for adult delinquents and other prob- 
lems that we have not suggested will occur to 
every reader. These questions sufficiently remind 
us how as followers of Jesus we are challenged 



THE RISEN LIFE 185 

to examine our own standards and the drift of 
the community of which we are members. Our 
social life as distinct from our economic relations 
has aroused groups of people of all creeds and 
no creed to associated effort to improve condi- 
tions. A directory of the most important organi- 
zations listed in The Survey shows more than 
twenty-five attacking specific problems on a na- 
tional scale. In addition, the great private foun- 
dations are engaged in research and demonstra- 
tion on various points involved. Federal, state, 
county, and municipal services have been organ- 
ized to a limited extent. The churches recognize 
the improvement of social conditions as part of 
their work and " social service' ' has an official 
place in church bodies. 

But there are certain distinctive contributions 
that Christians should be bringing to this field. 
Jesus has taught us that human life is a single 
whole. Do we, his followers, when we approach 
the problems of social service, analyze the con- 
ditions that we see are bad in education, health, 
and morals in their relation to the conditions 
under which the community does its work and 
earns its living? If we are loyal to the way of 
Jesus we shall think of housing, for example, as 
a problem of providing the best possible dwell- 
ings for all human beings, and the " rights' ' of 
the landlord and the low wages of the father will 
no more be accepted as immutable elements in the 
situation than the ignorance of the mother and 
the bad drainage and leaky roof and insufficient 
cubic air space which we have begun trying to 



136 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

change. And, again, do we try to find the inner 
roots of each problem? We know that conditions 
do not just happen but result in the long run 
from human desires. Problems of social condi- 
tions with which the community is wrestling can 
be traced to certain qualities in our life, sins in 
which we share but from which, as Christians, we 
must be cleansed if we are to purify the group. 
Thus, the landlord who wants profit on his 
houses is usually no better and no worse than 
any one who expects interest on private savings. 
Every employer pays the smallest wage that will 
buy him the kind of labor he needs. Profit for 
ourselves and the least possible for others is the 
evil principle that we detect as a main factor in 
this problem of housing. Do we yield to it in 
our own dealings ? Or are we earning with work 
and not with investment the money we use and 
paying no one a wage so small that it compels a 
standard of living we should be unwilling to 
share? 

The nation is committed to God. Our coins 
bear his name. Our legislative bodies open their 
sessions with prayer. Our President calls the 
Bible to witness to his intention of faithfulness 
in office. A citizen of the United States cannot set 
the things of Csesar over against the things of 
God as claiming a separate allegiance. But our 
corporate consciousness of God and of what He 
desires the nation to be is still rudimentary and 
confused. All of us, Christians, Jews, agnostic 
idealists, and pagans, probably agree that a na- 
tion has personality, a group character, the possi- 



THE RISEN LIFE 137 

bility of ethical growth. "We agree that the nation 
has an inherent responsibility to do what is right, 
but we have no clear agreement as to what is 
right. We agree that the group life of the nation 
claims an allegiance that takes precedence of our 
individual interests, but we do not agree as to 
what national allegiance involves. 

The follower of Jesus faces this confusion of 
ideals with certain guiding principles in mind. 
God, to us, is the loving Father of all mankind to 
whom all persons and groups within each nation, 
and all the separate nations are alike members 
of one great family. Every least individual mat- 
ters and the development of group life matters. 
But the groups that we have achieved are parts 
of a larger whole which matters more than the 
divided groups of which it is made up today. 
Alike to the interior life of a nation and to its 
international dealings the Christian applies the 
same tests of right and wrong that he uses in his 
personal dealings: Does it unite us or divide usf 
Does it promote or hinder in individual life and 
in group life the distinctively Christian quali- 
ties? We cannot judge lightly. We must have 
all the facts in each case and we must recognize 
the difficulty of finding the facts in the deluge of 
propaganda. 

Thus in the great political-economic struggle go- 
ing on within the United States, in which the 
alignment is increasingly clear of "open shop" 
employers, "100% Americans," and other defend- 
ers of things as they are against labor unions of 
various kinds, socialists, communists, social in- 



138 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

vestigators, liberals, and certain small groups of 
Christians, the follower of Jesus must understand 
social conditions and the underlying motives and 
sins as Jesus understood them in the simpler con- 
flict in Judea. In such international issues as the 
recognition of the Eussian Eepublic, the relation 
of the United States to Mexico, and our military 
occupation of Haiti and Santo Domingo, it is even 
more difficult to arrive at the facts. The least 
that we can do is to study fairly all we can find 
in opposition to the views of our own social or 
business group. "We do not need to be Chris- 
tians to remember that each country is entitled to 
its own way of development; that the rights of 
investors are secondary to the rights of wage- 
earners ; and that the rights of investors in a for- 
eign country are to be determined by that country 
and not by the country of which they are nation- 
als. But as Christians we shall go further and 
desire to assist and to have our nation assist (in 
so far as one nation can assist another without 
infringing upon its independence) the develop- 
ment in other countries of relations in which hu- 
man welfare takes precedence of profit. 

Again, the discussion of the League of Nations 
is confused and leaves our desire for a genuinely 
international viewpoint bewildered. Should a 
Christian support it or oppose it? He sees in 
the League a new unit to which individual nations 
have a responsibility and this seems like a step 
toward the unity of the human race. He hears it 
hailed as a protection from future wars, and such 
protection seems above all else desirable. But 



THE RISEN LIFE 139 

his thoughts return to those old sins — covetous- 
ness, desire for power, and race pride — which 
poison the life of his own nation and fill him with 
shame. Does the League of Nations mean that 
financial interests are organizing internation- 
ally? Does it show the great powers standing 
together to dominate the world? Does it perpet- 
uate the alignments of the Great War and retain 
the right forever to exclude certain nations from 
its membership? Does it play with the thought 
of disarmament while it continues to assume the 
principle of national defense? If he finds — as 
many Christians do — that the League of Nations 
organizes on a larger scale certain of the most 
menacing qualities in the life of each member 
nation he will oppose it. For his tests of right 
and wrong in group relations include not only: 
Does it unite or divide us? but, Does it promote 
or hinder the distinctively Christian qualities? 

The Christian's ideal for his nation and his in- 
terpretation of right and wrong in the concrete 
issues that arise will frequently involve opposi- 
tion to the expressed will of the majority. With 
other idealists, therefore, he must do clear think- 
ing about his duty as a loyal citizen of the nation. 
Must he obey laws that he considers wrong? 
Does the importance of group life, as a step to- 
ward the ideal of human unity, involve subor- 
dination of individual standards to the standards 
of the group? To the Christian, his nation is a 
living unit in process of development toward a 
group personality which will embody the qualities 
of Jesus. Selfish purposes of any individual or 



140 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

of any group within the nation yield to the ex- 
pressed will of the larger group. The Christian 
is never a law-breaker for his own advantage ; he 
does not get liquor in a prohibition country; he 
does not falsify his tax returns; he seeks no ex- 
emptions for his church nor his class but desires 
the same law for Christian and unbeliever, for 
rich and poor, for colored man and for white man. 
But where, in his judgment, laws are unjust he 
will work openly and fairly for their amendment ; 
where his conscience forbids him to obey them 
he will refuse publicly and will not attempt to 
evade such punishment as the group chooses to 
require. The fact that laws or the administra- 
tion of justice may seem to represent the will of 
some powerful minority and not the will of the 
majority which theoretically our government 
expresses, will not change the Christian's deter- 
mination to obey the law when selfish interest 
would object and publicly to refuse conformity 
and to suffer the consequences when an issue of 
right or wrong is involved. For the development 
of higher ethical standards in the nation requires 
no blind obedience to the present will of the group 
but a constant effort by every citizen to lead the 
group toward the best that he sees. 

The sharpest conflict between the citizen and 

the nation will arise in questions of national 

' 'honor,' ' national defense, and military neces- 

, sity. The Christian will never confuse the wishes 

of American investors in a foreign country or the 

: claims of American bankers who have made loans 

* to foreign governments with attacks that threaten 



THE RISEN LIFE 141 

the essential life of the United States. He is not 
misled by propaganda that uses patriotism as a 
cloak for financial gain, and he counters it with 
all the intelligence and persistence he can muster. 
But if he is convinced that the life of the nation 
is at stake, or if the country is actually involved 
in war, does he conform to the national will? 
Does he defend the nation's life with the best he 
can give to war? Does he give his own life while 
he kills his nation's enemies? Or does he see for 
his nation a way that is greater than war? Is 
there not truth for the nation as well as for the 
individual in the way of Jesus, suffering without 
retaliation, doing good to those who would injure 
us, penitent for our sins and seeing the best in our 
enemies, members of the human family seeking the 
good of the race by service unto death if need be 
and never by domination? If a Christian sees 
this challenge to the spiritual greatness of his 
nation, which loyalty shall he follow, — defense of 
the nation's pride and worldly power, or defense 
of the ideal to which he would call the nation? 
The idealist who refuses to participate in war 
does not seek to evade the consequences. He 
faces "the punishment that the nation inevitably 
requires so long as the majority place national 
defense above the quality of the national life. 
But the Christian who believes that in time of 
war he must silence his conscience and close his 
eyes to a distant ideal at least respects the prin- 
ciples of those who refuse to fight and does not 
join in heaping abuse upon them. 

During the Great War, individual Christians 



142 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

were not the only men whose consciences forbade 
them to fight. Others also have a sense of inter- 
national unity that seemed to them a higher loy- 
alty than obedience to the dictates of the United 
States Government. In the main they are social 
radicals, and this fact has, to the continuing 
shame of onr nation, been allowed to aggravate 
the severity of their punishment. 

And others, who profess neither Christianity 
nor radical social beliefs, are now joining the 
despised pacifists in an effort to bring home to 
the nation the folly and suicidal waste of war. 
They are showing us the economic losses of the 
victorious nations; they are pointing out the 
losses in democracy from which we have not yet 
begun to recover; they count up the loss to the 
human race, with much of the most vigorous 
stock in every nation killed before it has begotten 
children and with the physical degeneration of 
whole peoples inevitably resulting from lack of 
food. They tell us of the scientific research that 
every great power is now conducting to learn 
wholesale methods of killing which will replace 
the "small" killings of the Great War. But will 
the fact that the next war would wipe out whole 
cities and peoples and nations by itself make the 
"next war" impossible so long as the old motives 
remain? How can we use the present to learn 
the things that belong to peace? The generation 
that has experienced the horrors of war will pass, 
the waste of life and common wealth will be for- 
gotten, some new call to a great ideal will be 
sounded to deafen our ears so they will not recog- 



THE RISEN LIFE 143 

nize the evil voices of greed, domination, and race 
prejudice. Unless as individuals and nations we 
depart from the path of pride and self-aggran- 
dizement the new war will come. The nation will 
be destroyed because it sought to serve itself in- 
stead of serving the life of the race. 

But the Christian does not despair of trans- 
forming his nation. This threatening cataclysm 
of the next war, that seems an impersonal, irre- 
sistible tragedy, arises from the familiar evils 
whose roots he sees in himself. To it he opposes 
a determination to live for service and not for 
profit, to lead only as his leadership is sought and 
never to control the wills of others, and to find his 
neighbors beyond the bounds of class or race or 
nation. He seeks not only to contribute all his 
intelligence and enthusiasm and personal effort 
to the reconstruction of our economic order on the 
basis of mutual service and regard for human 
welfare, but he finds and cooperates with groups 
and parties of whatever name who desire the end 
that he desires; and he brings to their councils 
the truth he has learned from Jesus that the 
means employed to accomplish a social change 
must foster the qualities on which the success of 
the new social structure will depend. He empha- 
sizes the importance of economic relations as the 
strategic point from which to purify national and 
international life, because he knows that the qual- 
ities demanded for a man's working hours color 
his ethical code in other relationships. 

But he will contribute to the conflict more than 
a method. He sees with a unique perspective the 



144 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

victory won for the race by every man who is 
loyal to the best that he knows. He has learned 
from his crucified and risen Lord that a life given 
to the love of God and one's neighbor is stronger 
than evil because it is an instrument of the eter- 
nal purpose of God. He brings a spirit that has 
learned from the sacrament the mystery of 
Christ's presence with those who share in their 
own lives the sufferings of Christ. And he longs 
for the day when he can point to the way of the 
Christian Church to show that the true life of a 
group, like the life of an individual, is found in 
forgetfulness of self, in humility and penitence, 
and in willingness to suffer rather than be untrue 
to the quest of righteousness to which we are 
called. 

Questions for Discussion 

1. Find out the real issue and the arguments on both 
sides in some industrial dispute now going on. 
Which side would you like to see win in the struggle, 
and why? 

2. What immediate steps can you suggest for the pre- 
vention of violence in industrial disputes? 

3. What national sins call for the repentance of our 
country today? 

4. How would you phrase a Christian definition of 
patriotism ? 



APPENDIX 

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY GROUPS 

A group using this as text-book should plan for at 
least nine sessions, in order that the discussion of each 
of the eight chapters may follow a week of preparation. 
The group should have at hand several copies of The 
New Social Order, by the Reverend Harry F. Ward, and 
at least one copy of TJte Untried Door, by the Reverend 
Richard Roberts. It is desirable that every member of 
the group should read these two books before the closing 
session. 

The studies are based on the Synoptic Gospels. It 
would be helpful for those who wish to study the several 
versions of incidents or parables used in the studies to 
have A Harmony of the Synoptic Gospels, by Professors 
Burton and Goodspeed of the University of Chicago. 

The aims given below may be of assistance to leaders 
of study groups in guiding the discussion of the several 
chapters. Questions suggested for discussion are found 
at the close of each chapter. It will be remembered 
that the general aim of the studies is given in the 
preface. 

Chapter One 

Aim: To compare the social and economic problems to 
which Jesus came in Palestine with the social and 
economic problems today. 

Suggested Beading: 

.Ward, Harry F. "The New Social Order." The 
Macmillan Company, New York. 1920. Chap- 
ter 1. 

145 



146 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

Scott, Ernest F. "The Kingdom and the Mes- 
siah. " T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh. 1911. 
Chapters 1, 2, and 3. 

Also, 

Mathews, Shailer. "A History of New Testament 
Times in Palestine.' ' The Maemillan Company, 
New York. 1904. Chapters 12 and 13. 

Roberts, Richard. "The Untried Door." The 
Womans Press, New York. 1921. Chapter 1. 



Chapter Two 

Aim: To test our standards of family life by the home 
at Nazareth, first, in relation to material comfort, 
and, second, in relation to preparation for adult 
life in the community. 

Suggested Beading: 

Ward. "The New Social Order.' ' Chapter 2. 

Coe, George Albert. "A Social Theory of Reli- 
gious Education." Charles Scribner's Sons, 
New York. 1917. Especially chapter on The 
Family. 

r Also, 

Glover, T. R. "The Jesus of History." The Asso- 
ciation Press, New York. 1917. Chapters 2 
and 3. 



Chapter Three 

Aim: To test our industrial relations by principles 
shown in the decisions of Jesus and in his way of 
life. 

Suggested Beading: 

Ward. "The New Social Order." Chapters 3, 4 
and 5. 



APPENDIX 147 

Archbishops' Fifth Committee op Inquiry. 
''Christianity and Industrial Problems.' ' So- 
ciety for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Lon- 
don. 1919. The Maemillan Company, New 
York. 

Interchtjrch World Movement Report on the 
Steel Strike of 1919. Harcourt, Brace, and 
Company, New York. 1920. 

Parker, Carleton. ' ' The Casual Laborer and other 
Essays." Harcourt, Brace, and Company, New 
York. 1920. 

Rathenau, Walther. "The New Society." Har- 
court, Brace, and Company, New York. 1921. 
Chapter 11. 

Tawney, R. H. "The Acquisitive Society." Har- 
court, Brace, and Company, New York. 1920. 
Also, 

"By an Unknown Disciple." George H. Doran 
Company, New York. 1919. 

Chapter Four 

Aim: To test our relations with those of a different class 
by the qualities taught by Jesus as essential in the 
Kingdom of God. 

Suggested Beading: 

Ward. "The New Social Order." Chapter 6. 
Scott. "The Kingdom and the Messiah." Chap- 
ter 4. 
Roberts. "The Untried Door." 
Tawney. "The Acquisitive Society." 

Chapter Five 

Aim: In the light of the conflict of Jesus with accepted 
standards, to inquire into the nature of the con- 
flict inevitable for his followers today. 

Suggested Beading: 

Ward. "The New Social Order." Chapters 7 
and 8. 



148 JESUS CHRIST AND THE WORLD TODAY 

Foster, William Z. "The Great Steel Strike and 
its Lessons/ ' B. W. Huebsch, New York. 1920. 
Roberts. "The Untried Door." 

Also, 

Karsner, David. "Debs." Boni and Liveright, 
New York. 1919. Especially speeches of Debs. 

Chapter Six 

Aim: To learn from the prayers of Jesus the content 
of true Christian prayer. 

Suggested Beading: 

Ward. " The New Social Order. " Chapter 10. 
Roberts. "The Untried Door." 

Also, 

Brent, Charles H. "With God in the World." 
George W. Jacobs & Co., Philadelphia. 

Mott, John R. "Intercessors the Primary Need." 
The Association Press, New York. 1910. 

Scudder, Vida D. "Social Teachings of the Chris- 
tian Year." E. P. Dutton and Company, New 
York. 1921. 

Chapter Seven 

Aim: To test by the death of Jesus our idea of success 
and our willingness, as individuals and as churches, 
to pay the price of Christian ideals. 

Suggested Reading: 

Ward. ' ' The New Social Order. ' ' Chapter 11. 
Scott. "The Kingdom and the Messiah." Chap- 
ter 8. 

Chapter Eight 

Aim: To find the implications of our faith in the risen 
life of Jesus and the unfailing power of love, in 
relation to our life as citizens of the United States. 



APPENDIX 149 

Suggested Beading: 

Ward. "The New Social Order.' ' Chapters 9 and 

12. 
Irwin, Will. "The Next War." B. P. Dutton 

and Company, New York. 1921. 

Also, 

Brailsford, Henry N. "The War of Steel and 

Gold." G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., London. First 

published in 1914. 
Page, Kirby. "The Sword or the Cross." George 

H. Doran Company, New York, 1922. 



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